The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thoughthttp://unremediatedgender.space/2024-03-02T13:45:00-08:00Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles2024-03-02T13:45:00-08:002024-03-02T13:45:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2024-03-02:/2024/Mar/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/<blockquote>
<p>It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on it, all of them, they were doing the same, they had given Mitchum the lead and the method. It was Dave Mitchum who now belonged on this railroad and he, Bill Brent, who did not.</p>
<p>—<em>Atlas Shrugged</em> by Ayn Rand</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Quickly recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">ever since puberty, I've had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman</a>, which got contextualized by these life-changing Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky that taught me (amongst many other things) how fundamentally disconnected from reality my fantasy was. <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/">So it came as a huge surprise when</a>, around 2016, the "rationalist" community that had formed around the Sequences seemingly unanimously decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense. A couple years later, having strenuously argued against the popular misconception that the matter could be resolved by simply redefining the word <em>woman</em> (on the grounds that you can define the word any way you like), <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/">I flipped out when Yudkowsky prevaricated about</a> how his own philosophy of language says that you can't define a word any way you like, prompting me to join with allies to persuade him to clarify. When that failed, my attempts to cope with the "rationalists" being fake <a href="/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/">led to a series of small misadventures</a> culminating in Yudkowsky eventually clarifying the philosophy-of-language issue after I ran out of patience and yelled at him over email.</p>
<p>Really, that should have been the end of the story—with a relatively happy ending, too: that it's possible to correct straightforward philosophical errors, at the cost of almost two years of desperate effort by someone with <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect">Something to Protect</a>.</p>
<p>That wasn't the end of the story, which does not have such a relatively happy ending.</p>
<div class="toc"><span class="toctitle">Table of Contents</span><ul>
<li><a href="#the-new-york-timess-other-shoe-drops-february-2021">The New York Times's Other Shoe Drops (February 2021)</a></li>
<li><a href="#the-politics-of-the-apolitical">The Politics of the Apolitical</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-leaked-email-non-scandal-february-2021">A Leaked Email Non-Scandal (February 2021)</a></li>
<li><a href="#yudkowsky-doubles-down-february-2021">Yudkowsky Doubles Down (February 2021)</a></li>
<li><a href="#it-matters-whether-peoples-beliefs-about-themselves-are-actually-true">It Matters Whether People's Beliefs About Themselves Are Actually True</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-filter-affecting-your-evidence">A Filter Affecting Your Evidence</a></li>
<li><a href="#the-stated-reasons-not-being-the-real-reasons-is-a-form-of-community-harm">The Stated Reasons Not Being the Real Reasons Is a Form of Community Harm</a></li>
<li><a href="#people-who-are-trying-to-be-people-want-to-improve-their-self-models">People Who Are Trying to Be People Want to Improve Their Self-Models</a></li>
<li><a href="#criticism-of-public-statements-is-about-the-public-statements-not-subjective-intent">Criticism of Public Statements Is About the Public Statements, Not Subjective Intent</a></li>
<li><a href="#recap-of-yudkowskys-history-of-public-statements-on-transgender-identity">Recap of Yudkowsky's History of Public Statements on Transgender Identity</a></li>
<li><a href="#an-adversarial-game">An Adversarial Game</a></li>
<li><a href="#the-battle-that-matters">The Battle That Matters</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<h3 id="the-new-york-timess-other-shoe-drops-february-2021"><em>The New York Times</em>'s Other Shoe Drops (February 2021)</h3>
<p>On 13 February 2021, <a href="https://archive.ph/zW6oX">"Silicon Valley's Safe Space"</a>, the <a href="/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#the-new-york-times-pounces-june-2020">anticipated</a> <em>New York Times</em> piece on <em>Slate Star Codex</em>, came out. It was ... pretty lame? (<em>Just</em> lame, not a masterfully vicious hit piece.) Cade Metz did a mediocre job of explaining what our robot cult is about, while <a href="https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5310">pushing hard on the subtext</a> to make us look racist and sexist, occasionally resorting to odd constructions that were surprising to read from someone who had been a professional writer for decades. ("It was nominally a blog", Metz wrote of <em>Slate Star Codex</em>. <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nominally">"Nominally"</a>?) The article's claim that Alexander "wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed" seemed more like a critique of the many's reading comprehension than of Alexander's writing.</p>
<p>Although that poor reading comprehension may have served a protective function for Scott. A mob that attacks over things that look bad when quoted out of context can't attack you over the meaning of "wordy, often roundabout" text that they can't read. The <em>Times</em> article included this sleazy guilt-by-association attempt:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In one post, [Alexander] <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/">aligned himself with Charles Murray</a>, who proposed a link between race and I.Q. in "The Bell Curve." In another, he pointed out that Mr. Murray believes Black people "are genetically less intelligent than white people."<sup id="fnref:sloppy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:sloppy">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>But Alexander only "aligned himself with Murray" in <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/">"Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"</a> in the context of a simplified taxonomy of views on the etiology of poverty. This doesn't imply agreement with Murray's views on heredity! (A couple of years earlier, Alexander had written that <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/">"Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable"</a>: pessimism about our Society's ability to intervene to alleviate poverty does not amount to the claim that poverty is "genetic.")</p>
<p><a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article">Alexander's reply statement</a> pointed out the <em>Times</em>'s obvious chicanery, but (I claim) introduced a distortion of its own—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Times points out that I agreed with Murray that poverty was bad, and that also at some other point in my life noted that Murray had offensive views on race, and heavily implies this means I agree with Murray's offensive views on race. This seems like a weirdly brazen type of falsehood for a major newspaper.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It <em>is</em> a weirdly brazen invalid inference. But by calling it a "falsehood", Alexander heavily implies he disagrees with Murray's offensive views on race: in invalidating the <em>Times</em>'s charge of guilt by association with Murray, Alexander validates Murray's guilt.</p>
<p>But anyone who's read <em>and understood</em> Alexander's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds it plausible that there exist genetically mediated differences in socially relevant traits between ancestry groups (as a value-free matter of empirical science with no particular normative implications). For example, his <a href="https://archive.ph/Zy3EL">review of Judith Rich Harris on his old LiveJournal</a> indicates that he accepts the evidence from <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#twin-studies">twin studies</a> for individual behavioral differences having a large genetic component, and section III of his <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/">"The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"</a> indicates that he accepts genetics as an explanation for group differences in the particular case of Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence.<sup id="fnref:murray-alignment"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:murray-alignment">2</a></sup></p>
<p>There are a lot of standard caveats that go here which Alexander would no doubt scrupulously address if he ever chose to tackle the subject of genetically-mediated group differences in general: <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#heritability-caveats">the mere existence of a group difference in a "heritable" trait doesn't imply a genetic cause of the group difference (because the groups' environments could also be different)</a>. It is entirely conceivable that the Ashkenazi IQ advantage is real and genetic, but black–white IQ gap is fake and environmental.<sup id="fnref:bet"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bet">3</a></sup> Moreover, group averages are just that—averages. They don't imply anything about individuals and don't justify discrimination against individuals.</p>
<p>But anyone who's read <em>and understood</em> Charles Murray's work, knows that <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#individuals-should-not-be-judged-by-the-average">Murray also includes the standard caveats</a>!<sup id="fnref:murray-caveat"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:murray-caveat">4</a></sup> (Even though the one about group differences not implying anything about individuals is <a href="/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/">technically wrong</a>.) The <em>Times</em>'s insinuation that Scott Alexander is a racist <em>like Charles Murray</em> seems like a "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem">Gettier</a> attack": the charge is essentially correct, even though the evidence used to prosecute the charge before a jury of distracted <em>New York Times</em> readers is completely bogus.</p>
<h3 id="the-politics-of-the-apolitical">The Politics of the Apolitical</h3>
<p>Why do I <a href="/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#tragedy-of-recursive-silencing">keep</a> <a href="/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#literally-a-white-supremacist">bringing</a> up the claim that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of <em>New York Times</em> readers)?</p>
<p>It's because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by means of saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalists" and mainstream progressives, the defensive strategy of the "rationalists" is one of deception.</p>
<p>In this particular historical moment, we end up facing pressure from progressives, because—whatever our object-level beliefs about (say) <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/">sex, race, and class differences</a>, and however much most of us would prefer not to talk about them—on the <em>meta</em> level, our creed requires us to admit it's an empirical question, not a moral one—and that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god">empirical questions have no privileged reason to admit convenient answers</a>.</p>
<p>I view this conflict as entirely incidental, something that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cKrgy7hLdszkse2pq/archimedes-s-chronophone">would happen in some form in any place and time</a>, rather than being specific to American politics or "the left". In a Christian theocracy, our analogues would get in trouble for beliefs about evolution; in the old Soviet Union, our analogues would get in trouble for <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/">thinking about market economics</a> (as a positive <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorems_of_welfare_economics#Proof_of_the_first_fundamental_theorem">technical</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gk8Dvynrr9FWBztD4/what-s-a-market">discipline</a> adjacent to game theory, not yoked to a particular normative agenda).<sup id="fnref:logical-induction"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:logical-induction">5</a></sup></p>
<p>Incidental or not, the conflict is real, and everyone smart knows it—even if it's not easy to <em>prove</em> that everyone smart knows it, because everyone smart is very careful about what they say in public. (I am not smart.)</p>
<p>So <em>The New York Times</em> implicitly accuses us of being racists, like Charles Murray, and instead of pointing out that being a racist <em>like Charles Murray</em> is the obviously correct position that sensible people will tend to reach in the course of being sensible, we disingenuously deny everything.<sup id="fnref:deny-everything"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:deny-everything">6</a></sup></p>
<p>It works surprisingly well. I fear my love of Truth is not so great that if I didn't have Something to Protect, I would have happily participated in the cover-up.</p>
<p>As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of <em>throwing me under the bus</em>. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (We think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a handful of East and South Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of <em>The Bell Curve</em>.) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic">Subjectively</a>, I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Altruism (as <a href="/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/">contrasted with the old days</a>) but survey data doesn't unambiguously back this up.<sup id="fnref:survey-data"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:survey-data">7</a></sup></p>
<p>But <em>trans!</em> We have plenty of those! In <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/">the same blog post in which Scott Alexander characterized rationalism as the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph</a>, he also named "don't misgender trans people" as one of the group's distinguishing norms. Two years later, he joked that <a href="https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup">"We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"</a>.</p>
<p>The benefit of having plenty of trans people is that high-ranking members of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_stack">progressive stack</a> can be trotted out as a shield to prove that we're not counterrevolutionary right-wing Bad Guys. Thus, <a href="https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790">Jacob Falkovich noted</a> (on 23 June 2020, just after <em>Slate Star Codex</em> went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders", and Scott Aaronson <a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310">noted (in commentary on the February 2021 <em>New York Times</em> article) that</a> "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" should have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.</p>
<p>Even the haters grudgingly give Alexander credit for <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"</a>: "I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least acknowledging you were wrong", <a href="https://archive.is/SlJo1">wrote one</a>.</p>
<p><a id="dump-stats"></a>Under these circumstances, dethroning the supremacy of gender identity ideology is politically impossible. All our <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">Overton margin</a> is already being spent somewhere else; sanity on this topic is our <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumpStat">dump stat</a>.</p>
<p>But this being the case, <em>I have no reason to participate in the cover-up</em>. What's in it for me? Why should I defend my native subculture from external attack, if the defense preparations themselves have already rendered it uninhabitable to me?</p>
<h3 id="a-leaked-email-non-scandal-february-2021">A Leaked Email Non-Scandal (February 2021)</h3>
<p>On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan, disapproving of Scott and the community's defense against the <em>Times</em>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857">claimed that</a> Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published <a href="https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/">an email he had received from Scott in February 2014</a> on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.</p>
<p>I think that to people who have read <em>and understood</em> Alexander's work, there is nothing surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. He said that biologically mediated group differences are probably real and that neoreactionaries were the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses or the meta-level question of why our Society's intelligentsia is obfuscating the matter. He said that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage but that he trusted himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. The email contains some details that Alexander hadn't blogged about—most notably the section headed "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing <em>vis á vis</em> the neoreactionaries and his own popularity. But again, none of it is surprising if you know Scott from his writing.</p>
<p>I think the main reason someone <em>would</em> consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read <em>Slate Star Codex</em> that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was "that guy who's so committed to charitable discourse that he <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/">wrote up an explanation of what <em>reactionaries</em> (of all people) believe</a>—and then <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/">turned around and wrote up the definitive explanation of why they're totally wrong and you shouldn't pay them any attention</a>." As a first approximation, it's not a terrible picture. But what it misses—what <em>Scott</em> knows—is that charity isn't about putting on a show of superficially respecting your ideological opponent before concluding (of course) that they're wrong. Charity is about seeing what the other guy is getting <em>right</em>.</p>
<p>The same day, Yudkowsky published <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/pfbid02ZoAPjap94KgiDg4CNi1GhhhZeQs3TeTc312SMvoCrNep4smg41S3G874saF2ZRSQl">a Facebook post</a> that said<sup id="fnref:brennan-condemnation-edits"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:brennan-condemnation-edits">8</a></sup>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them, but in case it wasn't obvious consider the point made explicitly. (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was annoyed at how the discussion seemed to be ignoring the obvious political angle, and the next day, 18 February 2021, I wrote <a href="/images/davis-why_they_say_they_hate_us.png">a widely Liked comment</a>: I agreed that there was a grain of truth to the claim that our detractors hate us because they're evil bullies, but stopping the analysis there seemed incredibly shallow and transparently self-serving.</p>
<p>If you listened to why <em>they</em> said they hated us, it was because we were racist, sexist, transphobic fascists. The party-line response seemed to be trending toward, "That's obviously false: Scott voted for Elizabeth Warren, look at all the social democrats on the <em>Less Wrong</em>/<em>Slate Star Codex</em> surveys, <em>&c.</em> They're just using that as a convenient smear because they like bullying nerds."</p>
<p>But if "sexism" included "It's an empirical question whether innate statistical psychological sex differences of some magnitude exist, it empirically looks like they do, and this has implications about our social world" (as articulated in, for example, Alexander's <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/">"Contra Grant on Exaggerated Differences"</a>), then the "<em>Slate Star Codex</em> <em>et al.</em> are crypto-sexists" charge was absolutely correct. (Crypto-racist, crypto-fascist, <em>&c.</em> left as an exercise for the reader.)</p>
<p>You could plead, "That's a bad definition of sexism," but that's only convincing if you've been trained in using empiricism and open discussion to discover policies with utilitarian-desirable outcomes. People whose education came from California public schools plus Tumblr didn't already know that. (<a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism">I didn't know that</a> at age 18 back in 'aught-six, and we didn't even have Tumblr then.) In that light, you could see why someone who was more preöccupied with eradicating bigotry than protecting the right to privacy might find "blow the whistle on people who are claiming to be innocent but are actually guilty (of thinking bad thoughts)" to be a more compelling consideration than "respect confidentiality requests".<sup id="fnref:no-promises"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:no-promises">9</a></sup></p>
<p>Here, I don't think Scott has anything to be ashamed of—but that's because I don't think learning from right-wingers is a crime. If our actual problem was "Genuinely consistent rationalism is realistically always going to be an enemy of the state, because <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">the map that fully reflects the territory is going to include facts that powerful coalitions would prefer to censor, no matter what specific ideology happens to be on top in a particular place and time</a>", but we thought our problem was "We need to figure out how to exclude evil bullies", then we were in trouble!</p>
<p>Yudkowsky <a href="/images/yudkowsky-we_need_to_exclude_evil_bullies.png">replied that</a> everyone had a problem of figuring out how to exclude evil bullies. We also had an inevitable <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/">Kolmogorov complicity</a> problem, but that shouldn't be confused with the evil bullies issue, even if bullies attack via Kolmogorov issues.</p>
<p>I'll agree that the problems shouldn't be confused. I can easily believe that Brennan was largely driven by bully-like motives even if he told himself a story about being a valiant whistleblower defending Cade Metz's honor against Scott's deception.</p>
<p>But I think it's important to notice both problems, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy. Without defending Brennan's actions, there's a non-evil-bully case for wanting to reveal information, rather than participate in a cover-up to protect the image of the "rationalists" as non-threatening to the progressive egregore. If the orchestrators of the cover-up can't even acknowledge to themselves that they're orchestrating a cover-up, they're liable to be confusing themselves about other things, too.</p>
<p>As it happened, I had another social media interaction with Yudkowsky that same day, 18 February 2021. Concerning the psychology of people who hate on "rationalists" for alleged sins that don't particularly resemble anything we do or believe, <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608">he wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In reply, Michael Vassar tagged me. "Michael, I thought you weren't talking to me <a href="/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/#a-private-catastrophe-december-2020">(after my failures of 18–19 December)</a>?" <a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362549606538641413">I said</a>. "But yeah, I wrote a couple blog posts about this thing", linking to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist">"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"</a> and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie">"Algorithmic Intent: A Hansonian Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle"</a></p>
<p>After a few moments, I decided it was better if I <a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1362555980232282113">explained the significance of Michael tagging me</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oh, maybe it's relevant to note that those posts were specifically part of my 21-month rage–grief campaign of being furious at Eliezer all day every day for lying-by-implicature about the philosophy of language? But, I don't want to seem petty by pointing that out! I'm over it!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And I think I <em>would</em> have been over it ...</p>
<p>—except that Yudkowsky reopened the conversation four days later, on 22 February 2021, with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228">a new Facebook post</a> explaining the origins of his intuitions about pronoun conventions. It concludes that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just <em>is</em> the normative definition. Because it is <em>logically rude</em>, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition <em>into the very language protocol we are using to communicate</em>."</p>
<p>(Why!? Why reopen the conversation, from the perspective of his chessboard? Wouldn't it be easier to just stop digging? Did my highly-Liked Facebook comment and Twitter barb about him lying by implicature temporarily bring my concerns to the top of his attention, despite the fact that I'm generally not that important?)</p>
<h3 id="yudkowsky-doubles-down-february-2021">Yudkowsky Doubles Down (February 2021)</h3>
<p>I eventually explained what was wrong with Yudkowsky's new arguments at the length of 12,000 words in March 2022's <a href="/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/">"Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"</a>,<sup id="fnref:challenges-title"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:challenges-title">10</a></sup>. Briefly: given a conflict over pronoun conventions, there's not going to be a "right answer", but we can at least be objective in describing what the conflict is about, and Yudkowsky wasn't doing that. Given that we can't coordinate a switch to universal singular <em>they</em>, the pronouns <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> continue to have different meanings in the minds of native English speakers, in the sense that your mind forms different probabilistic expectations of someone taking feminine or masculine pronouns. That's <em>why</em> trans people want to be referred to by the pronoun corresponding to their chosen gender: if there were literally no difference in meaning, there would be no reason to care. Thus, making the distinction on the basis of gender identity rather than sex <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences">has consequences</a>; by proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's <em>not</em> simple and not <em>unambiguously</em> the best, Yudkowsky was <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided">falsely portraying the policy debate as one-sided</a>. Furthermore, this misrepresentation would have harmful effects insofar as anyone was dumb enough to believe it: gender-dysphoric people deciding whether or not to socially transition need a correct model of how English pronouns work in the real world in order to perform an accurate cost–benefit analysis.</p>
<p>I have more to say here (that I decided to cut from "Challenges") about the meta-level political context. The February 2021 post on pronouns is a fascinating document, in its own way—a penetrating case study on the effects of politics on a formerly great mind.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky begins by setting the context of "[h]aving received a bit of private pushback" on his willingness to declare that asking someone to use a different pronoun is not lying.</p>
<p>But the reason he got a bit <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/">("a bit")</a> of private pushback was because the November 2018 Twitter thread in question was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were defining a conlang from scratch); the problem is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (<a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096">"Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"</a>) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a fact about reality that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves facts (as if anyone had doubted this).</p>
<p>In that context, it's revealing that in this February 2021 post attempting to explain why the November 2018 thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size", on the grounds that it's "logically rude to demand that other people use only your language system and interpretation convention in order to communicate, in advance of them having agreed with you about the clustering thing."</p>
<p>But I've never measured how big someone's gametes are, have you? We only infer whether strangers' bodies are configured to produce small or large gametes by observing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic">a variety of correlated characteristics</a>. Thus, the complaint that sex-based pronoun conventions rudely demand that people "agree[ ] [...] about the clustering thing" is hypocritical, because Yudkowsky's proposal also expects people to agree about the clustering thing. Furthermore, for trans people who don't pass but are visibly trying to (without having explicitly asked for pronouns), one presumes that we're supposed to use the pronouns corresponding to their gender presentation, not their natal sex.</p>
<p>Thus, Yudkowsky's "gamete-size default" proposal can't be taken literally. The only way I can make sense of it is to interpret it as a flail at the prevailing reality that people are good at noticing what sex other people are, but that we want to be kind to people who are trying to appear to be the other sex.</p>
<p>One could argue that this is hostile nitpicking on my part: that the use of "gamete size" as a metonym for sex here is either an attempt to provide an unambiguous definition (because if you said <em>sex</em>, <em>female</em>, or <em>male</em>, someone could ask what you meant by that), or that it's at worst a clunky choice of words, not an intellectually substantive decision.</p>
<p>But the post seems to suggest that the motive isn't simply to avoid ambiguity. Yudkowsky writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.</p>
<p>And I'm not happy that the very language I use, would try to force me to take a position on that; not a complicated nuanced position, but a binarized position, <em>simply in order to talk grammatically about people at all</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What does the "tossed into a bucket" metaphor refer to, though? I can think of many things that might be summarized that way, and my sympathy for the one who does not like to be tossed into a bucket depends on exactly what real-world situation is being mapped to the bucket.</p>
<p>If we're talking about overt gender role enforcement—things like, "You're a girl, therefore you need to learn to keep house for your future husband," or "You're a man, therefore you need to toughen up"—then indeed, I strongly support people who don't want to be tossed into that kind of bucket.</p>
<p>(There are <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">historical reasons for the buckets to exist</a>, but I'm eager to bet on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt out of the default buckets without causing too much trouble.)</p>
<p>But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons having genuine merit—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "Your expectation that I be able to toughen up is not reasonable given the individuating information you have about me in particular being huge crybaby, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I don't think people have a general right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, <em>because that would be crazy</em>. If a doctor were to recommend I get a prostate cancer screening on account of my being male and therefore at risk for prostate cancer, it would be <em>bonkers</em> for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.</p>
<p>When piously appealing to the feelings of people describing reasons they do not want to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket, Yudkowsky does not seem to be distinguishing between reasons that have merit, and reasons that do not. The post continues (bolding mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In a wide variety of cases, sure, ["he" and "she"] can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.</p>
<p>But if somebody's hair color is halfway between two central points? If their civilization has developed stereotypes about hair color they're not comfortable with, such that they feel that the pronoun corresponding to their outward hair color is something they're not comfortable with because they don't fit key aspects of the rest of the stereotype and they feel strongly about that? If they have dyed their hair because of that, or <strong>plan to get hair surgery, or would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so?</strong> Then it's stupid to try to force people to take complicated positions about those social topics <em>before they are allowed to utter grammatical sentences</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color seems pretty bad. The people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.</p>
<p>But taking the convention as given, a demand to be referred to as having a hair color <em>that one does not have</em> seems outrageous to me!</p>
<p>It makes sense to object to the convention forcing a binary choice in the "halfway between two central points" case. That's an example of genuine nuance brought on by a genuine complication to a system that <em>falsely</em> assumes discrete hair colors.</p>
<p>But "plan to get hair surgery"? "Would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so"? In what sense do these cases present a challenge to the discrete system and therefore call for complication and nuance? There's nothing ambiguous about these cases: if you haven't, in fact, changed your hair color, then your hair is, in fact, its original color. The decision to get hair surgery does not <em>propagate backwards in time</em>. The decision to get hair surgery cannot be <em>imported from a counterfactual universe in which it is safer</em>. People who, today, do not have the hair color that they would prefer are, today, going to have to deal with that fact <em>as a fact</em>.<sup id="fnref:pronoun-roles"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:pronoun-roles">11</a></sup></p>
<p>Is the idea that we want to use the same pronouns for the same person over time, so that if we know someone is going to get hair surgery—they have an appointment with the hair surgeon at this-and-such date—we can go ahead and switch their pronouns in advance? Okay, I can buy that.</p>
<p>But extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is absurd. No one treats <em>conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology</em> the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated, nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless the real motive is obfuscation—unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?</p>
<h3 id="it-matters-whether-peoples-beliefs-about-themselves-are-actually-true">It Matters Whether People's Beliefs About Themselves Are Actually True</h3>
<p>Maybe the problem is easier to see in the context of a non-gender example. My <em>previous</em> <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">hopeless ideological war</a> was <a href="/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/">against the conflation of <em>schooling</em> and <em>education</em></a>: I hated being tossed into the Student Bucket, as it would be assigned by my school course transcript, or perhaps at all.</p>
<p>I sometimes describe myself as mildly "gender dysphoric", because our culture doesn't have better widely understood vocabulary for my <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity">beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing</a>. But if we're talking about suffering and emotional distress, my "student dysphoria" was vastly worse than any "gender dysphoria" I've ever felt.</p>
<p>(I remember being particularly distraught one day at the end of community college physics class, and stumbling to the guidance counselor to inquire urgently about just escaping this place with an associate's degree, rather than transferring to a university to finish my bachelor's as planned. I burst into tears again when the counselor mentioned that there would be a physical education requirement. It wasn't that a semester of P.E. would be difficult; it was the indignity of being subject to such meaningless requirements before Society would see me as a person.)</p>
<p>But crucially, my tirades against the Student Bucket described reasons not just that I didn't like it, but that the bucket was wrong on the empirical merits: people can and do learn important things by studying and practicing out of their own curiosity and ambition. The system was in the wrong for assuming that nothing you do matters unless you do it on the command of a designated "teacher" while enrolled in a designated "course".</p>
<p>And because my war footing was founded on the empirical merits, I knew that I had to update to the extent that the empirical merits showed that <em>I</em> was in the wrong. In 2010, I took a differential equations class "for fun" at the local community college, expecting to do well and thereby prove that my previous couple years of math self-study had been the equal of any schoolstudent's.</p>
<p>In fact, I did very poorly and scraped by with a <em>C</em>. (Subjectively, I felt like I "understood the concepts" and kept getting surprised when that understanding somehow didn't convert into passing quiz scores.) That hurt. That hurt a lot.</p>
<p><em>It was supposed to hurt</em>. One could imagine a less reflective person doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along and that any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.</p>
<p>I knew better than to behave like that. My failure didn't mean I had been wrong about everything, that I should humbly resign myself to the Student Bucket forever and never dare to question it again—but it did mean that I must have been wrong about <em>something</em>. I could <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally">update myself incrementally</a>—but I <em>did</em> need to update. (Probably, that "math" encompasses different subskills, and that my glorious self-study had unevenly trained some skills and not others: there was nothing contradictory or unreal about my <a href="https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15143/does-the-method-for-solving-exact-des-generalize-like-this">successfully generalizing one of the methods in the differential equations textbook to arbitrary numbers of variables</a> while also <a href="https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/7984/automatizing-computational-skills">struggling with the class's assigned problem sets</a>.)</p>
<p>Someone who uncritically validated my dislike of the Student Bucket rather than assessing my reasons, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, not a map that reflects my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a <em>C</em> in community college differential equations, rather than denying it or claiming that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get <em>other</em> chances to prove that my autodidacticism could match the standard set by schools, even if it hadn't that time. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When I interviewed for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)</p>
<p>If you can see why uncritically affirming people's current self-image isn't the solution to "student dysphoria", it should be clear why the same applies to gender dysphoria. There's a general underlying principle: it matters whether that self-image is true.</p>
<p>In an article titled <a href="https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/actually-i-was-just-crazy-the-whole">"Actually, I Was Just Crazy the Whole Time"</a>, FtMtF detransitioner Michelle Alleva contrasts her current beliefs with those when she decided to transition. While transitioning, she accounted for many pieces of evidence about herself ("dislikes attention as a female", "obsessive thinking about gender", "doesn't fit in with the girls", <em>&c</em>.) in terms of the theory "It's because I'm trans." But now, Alleva writes, she thinks she has a variety of better explanations that, all together, cover the original list: "It's because I'm autistic," "It's because I have unresolved trauma," "It's because women are often treated poorly" ... including "That wasn't entirely true" (!).</p>
<p>This is a rationality skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, which she revised upon further consideration of the evidence. Beliefs about oneself aren't special and can—must—be updated using the <em>same</em> methods that you would use to reason about anything else—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection">just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transistors "in the environment."</a><sup id="fnref:the-form-of-the-inference"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:the-form-of-the-inference">12</a></sup></p>
<p>This also isn't a particularly advanced rationality skill. This is basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.</p>
<p>Back in 2009, in the early days of <em>Less Wrong</em>, when I hadn't yet grown out of <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism">my teenage ideological fever dream of psychological sex differences denialism</a>, there was a poignant exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2">"never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."</a> Offended at our leader's sexism, I <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj">passive-aggressively asked him to elaborate</a>. In <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF">his response</a>, he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [<em>sic</em>]."</p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b">I replied</a> (bolding added):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—<strong>or at least, that not all men <em>want</em> to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me">not <em>necessarily</em> something to integrate</a>.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>I knew</em>. Even then, <em>I knew</em> I had to qualify my not liking to be tossed into a Male Bucket. I could object to Yudkowsky speaking as if men were a collective with shared normative ideals ("a lifetime's work to integrate"), but I couldn't claim to somehow not be male, or even that people couldn't make probabilistic predictions about me given the fact that I'm male ("the fact of masculinity"), <em>because that would be crazy</em>. The culture of early <em>Less Wrong</em> wouldn't have let me get away with that.</p>
<p>It would seem that in the current year, that culture is dead—or if it has any remaining practitioners, they do not include Eliezer Yudkowsky.</p>
<h3 id="a-filter-affecting-your-evidence">A Filter Affecting Your Evidence</h3>
<p>At this point, some readers might protest that I'm being too uncharitable in harping on the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post also explicitly says that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I agree that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he meant to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the reading that doesn't make sense?</p>
<p>I reply: <em>given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky</em>—no, obviously not. I have been <a href="https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1820866#reply-1820866">"trained in a theory of social deception that says that people can arrange reasons, excuses, for anything"</a>, such that it's informative <a href="http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/47">"to look at what <em>ended up</em> happening, assume it was the <em>intended</em> result, and ask who benefited."</a> If Yudkowsky just wanted to post about how gendered pronouns are unnecessary and bad as an apolitical matter of language design, he could have written a post just making that narrow point. What ended up happening is that he wrote a post featuring sanctimonious flag-waving about the precious feelings of people "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket", and concluding with a policy proposal that gives the trans activist coalition everything they want, proclaiming this "the simplest and best protocol" without so much as acknowledging the arguments on <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided">the other side of the policy debate</a>. I don't think it's crazy for me to assume this was the intended result, and to ask who benefited.</p>
<p>When smart people act dumb, it's often wise to conjecture that their behavior represents <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie"><em>optimized</em> stupidity</a>—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some channel other than their words straightforwardly reflecting reality. Someone who was actually stupid wouldn't be able to generate text so carefully fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think the point is to pander to biological sex denialists without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could call out as a "lie."</p>
<p>On a close reading of the comment section, we see hints that Yudkowsky does not obviously disagree with this interpretation of his behavior? First, we get <a href="/images/yudkowsky-the_disclaimer.png">a disclaimer comment</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.</p>
<p>This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.</p>
<p>Personally, I'm used to operating without the cognitive support of a civilization in controversial domains, and have some confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it myself before speaking. So you know, from having read this, that I checked all the speakable and unspeakable arguments I had thought of, and concluded that this speakable argument would be good on net to publish, as would not be the case if I knew of a stronger but unspeakable counterargument in favor of Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying.</p>
<p>But the existence of a wide social filter like that should be kept in mind; to whatever quantitative extent you don't trust your ability plus my ability to think of valid counterarguments that might exist, as a Bayesian you should proportionally update in the direction of the unknown arguments you speculate might have been filtered out.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The explanation of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">the problem of political censorship filtering evidence</a> here is great, but the part where Yudkowsky claims "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter" is laughable. The point I articulated at length in <a href="/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/">"Challenges"</a> (that <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> have existing meanings that you can't just ignore, given that the existing meanings are what motivate people to ask for new pronouns in the first place) is obvious.</p>
<p>It would arguably be less embarrassing for Yudkowsky if he were lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't that bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he just didn't put any effort into thinking about why someone might disagree. I don't have a problem with selective argumentation that's clearly labeled as such: there's no shame in being an honest specialist who says, "I've mostly thought about these issues though the lens of ideology <em>X</em>, and therefore can't claim to be comprehensive or even-handed; if you want other perspectives, you'll have to read other authors and think it through for yourself."</p>
<p>But if he <em>did</em> put in the effort to aspire to <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Twelve-Virtues-Of-Rationality">the virtue of evenness</a>—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and still ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without mentioning any of its obvious costs, that's discrediting. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is that bad, why would you trust his opinion about anything?</p>
<p>Furthermore, the claim that only I "would have said anything where you could hear it" is also discrediting of the community. Transitioning or not is a <em>major life decision</em> for many of the people in this community. People in this community <em>need the goddamned right answers</em> to the questions I've been asking in order to make that kind of life decision sanely <a href="/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/">(whatever the sane decisions turn out to be)</a>. If the community is so bad at exploring the space of arguments that I'm the only one who can talk about the obvious decision-relevant considerations that code as "anti-trans" when you project into the one-dimensional subspace corresponding to our Society's usual culture war, why would you pay attention to the community <em>at all</em>? Insofar as the community is successfully marketing itself to promising young minds as the uniquely best place in the world for reasoning and sensemaking, then "the community" is <em>fraudulent</em> (misleading people about what it has to offer in a way that's optimized to move resources to itself). It needs to either rebrand—or failing that, disband—or failing that, <em>be destroyed</em>.</p>
<p>The "where you could hear it" clause is particularly bizarre—as if Yudkowsky assumes that people in "the community" <em>don't read widely</em>. It's gratifying to be acknowledged by my caliph—or it would be, if he were still my caliph—but I don't think the points I've been making since 2016, about the relevance of autogynephilia to male-to-female transsexualism, and the reality of biological sex (!), are particularly novel.</p>
<p>I think I <em>am</em> unusual in the amount of analytical rigor I can bring to bear on these topics. Similar points are often made by authors such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock">Kathleen Stock</a> or <a href="https://corinnacohn.substack.com/">Corinna Cohn</a> or <a href="https://aaronterrell.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-my-agp-normalization">Aaron Terrell</a>—or for that matter <a href="https://www.unz.com/isteve/dont-mention-the-autogynephilia/">Steve Sailer</a>—but those authors don't have the background to formulate it <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">in the language of probabilistic graphical models</a> the way I do. <em>That</em> part is a genuine value-add of the "rationalist" memeplex—something I wouldn't have been able to do without <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">the influence of Yudkowsky's Sequences</a>, and all the math books I studied afterwards because the vibe of the <em>Overcoming Bias</em> comment section in 2008 made that seem like an important and high-status thing to do.</p>
<p>But the promise of the Sequences was in offering a discipline of thought that could be applied to everything you would have read and thought about anyway. This notion that if someone in the community didn't say something, then Yudkowsky's faithful students wouldn't be able to hear it, would have been rightfully seen as absurd: <em>Overcoming Bias</em> was a gem of the blogoshere, not a substitute for the rest of it. (Nor was the blogosphere a substitute for the University library, which escaped the autodidact's <a href="/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/">resentment of the tyranny of schools</a> by <a href="https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/access-library-collections-by-external-users">selling borrowing privileges to the public for $100 a year</a>.) To the extent that the Yudkowsky of the current year takes for granted that his faithful students <em>don't read Steve Sailer</em>, he should notice that he's running a cult or a fandom rather than an intellectual community.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky's disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky <a href="/images/yudkowsky-people_might_be_able_to_speak_that.png">offers us another clue as to what's going on here</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from <em>the other side</em>" (emphasis mine) is very interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community is, in fact, a partisan institution. An intellectual community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality would not have an <em>other side</em>.)</p>
<p>I think (a) and (b) as stated are clearly false, so "we" (who?) aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some similar hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?</p>
<p>Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a′) self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias">socially-desirable responding tendencies</a>—as a notable example, heterosexual males with <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html">sexual fantasies about being female</a> <a href="/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf">often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex</a>.<sup id="fnref:motivatedly-inaccurate"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:motivatedly-inaccurate">13</a></sup></p>
<p>And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular subcultures (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans if they lived in a different subculture.</p>
<p>I claim that (a′) and (b′) are overwhelmingly likely to be true. Can "we" talk about <em>that</em>? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not? We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on the Whole Dumb Story <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/">I've</a> <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/">been</a> <a href="/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/">telling</a> you about how I wasted the last eight years of my life on this, I'm going to guess that the answer is broadly No: "we" can't talk about that. (I can say it, and people can debate me in a private Discord server where the general public isn't looking, but it's not something someone of Yudkowsky's stature can afford to acknowledge.)</p>
<p>But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's actually going on with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole post in a different light: making sense of the discussion requires analyzing what isn't being said.</p>
<p>In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in his <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521">November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter thread</a>—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". <a href="/images/yudkowsky-wrong_place_to_pack_it.png">He continues</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Calling someone a "woman"] <em>is</em> closer to the right sort of thing <em>ontologically</em> to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to <em>debate</em> whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.</p>
<p>Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sure, if we were designing a constructed language from scratch with the understanding that a person's "gender" is a contested social construct rather than their sex being an objective and undisputed fact, then yes: in that situation <em>which we are not in</em>, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their existing native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, by your own admission, you have <em>no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!</em></p>
<p>(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is much better than not admitting it, so huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point.)</p>
<p><a href="/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/#t-v-distinction">As discussed in "Challenges"</a>, there's an instructive comparison to languages that have formality-based second person pronouns, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted"><em>tú</em> and <em>usted</em> in Spanish</a>. It's one thing to advocate for collapsing the distinction and just settling on one second-person singular pronoun for the Spanish language. That's principled.</p>
<p>It's another thing altogether to try to prevent a speaker from using <em>tú</em> to indicate disrespect towards a social superior (on the stated rationale that the <em>tú</em>/<em>usted</em> distinction is dumb and shouldn't exist) while also refusing to entertain the speaker's arguments for why their interlocutor is unworthy of the deference that would be implied by <em>usted</em> (because such arguments are "unspeakable" for political reasons). That's psychologically abusive.</p>
<p>If Yudkowsky actually possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be obvious to him that "Gendered Pronouns for Everyone and Asking To Leave the System Is Lying" isn't the hill anyone would care about dying on <a href="/2019/Dec/more-schelling/">if it weren't a Schelling point</a>. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be overjoyed to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists" and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">"Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"</a> and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Subjective Gender Identity." The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy of pronouns is because they suspect, correctly, that pronouns are being used as a rhetorical wedge to keep people from talking or thinking about sex.</p>
<h3 id="the-stated-reasons-not-being-the-real-reasons-is-a-form-of-community-harm">The Stated Reasons Not Being the Real Reasons Is a Form of Community Harm</h3>
<p>Having analyzed the ways in which Yudkowsky is playing dumb here, what's still not entirely clear is why. Presumably he cares about maintaining his credibility as an insightful and fair-minded thinker. Why tarnish that by putting on this haughty performance?</p>
<p>Of course, presumably he doesn't think he's tarnishing it—but why not? <a href="/images/yudkowsky-personally_prudent_and_not_community-harmful.png">He graciously explains in the Facebook comments</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think that in a half-Kolmogorov-Option environment where people like Zack haven't actually been shot and you get away with attaching explicit disclaimers like this one, it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do <em>know</em> they're living in a half-Stalinist environment [...] I think people are better off at the end of that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ah, <em>prudence</em>! He continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in a line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful is that you're thereby necessarily <em>not</em> exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that <em>determines</em> your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to others after the fact.</p>
<p>The best explanation of this I know of was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument">"A Rational Argument"</a>. It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As a campaign manager reading a book on rationality, one question lies foremost on your mind: "How can I construct an impeccable rational argument that Mortimer Q. Snodgrass is the best candidate for Mayor of Hadleyburg?"</p>
<p>Sorry. It can't be done.</p>
<p>"What?" you cry. "But what if I use only valid support to construct my structure of reason? What if every fact I cite is true to the best of my knowledge, and relevant evidence under Bayes's Rule?"</p>
<p>Sorry. It still can't be done. You defeated yourself the instant you specified your argument's conclusion in advance.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The campaign manager is in possession of a survey of mayoral candidates on which Snodgrass compares favorably to others, except for one question. The post continues (bolding mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So you are tempted to publish the questionnaire as part of your own campaign literature ... with the 11th question omitted, of course.</p>
<p><strong>Which crosses the line between <em>rationality</em> and <em>rationalization</em>.</strong> It is no longer possible for the voters to condition on the facts alone; they must condition on the additional fact of their presentation, and infer the existence of hidden evidence.</p>
<p>Indeed, <strong>you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.</strong> "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing <em>forward</em> from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing <em>backward</em> from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of illogical argument, even though both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) and the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises; the reason all squares are rectangles isn't <em>because</em> they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general form "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the real reasons. The post concludes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you really want to present an honest, rational argument <em>for your candidate</em>, in a political campaign, there is only one way to do it:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Before anyone hires you</em>, gather up all the evidence you can about the different candidates.</li>
<li>Make a checklist which you, yourself, will use to decide which candidate seems best.</li>
<li>Process the checklist.</li>
<li>Go to the winning candidate.</li>
<li>Offer to become their campaign manager.</li>
<li>When they ask for campaign literature, print out your checklist.</li>
</ul>
<p>Only in this way can you offer a <em>rational</em> chain of argument, one whose bottom line was written flowing <em>forward</em> from the lines above it. Whatever <em>actually</em> decides your bottom line is the only thing you can <em>honestly</em> write on the lines above.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I remember this being pretty shocking to read back in 'aught-seven. What an alien mindset, that you somehow "can't" argue for something! It's a shockingly high standard for anyone to aspire to—but what made Yudkowsky's Sequences so life-changing was that they articulated the existence of such a standard. For that, I will always be grateful.</p>
<p>... which is why it's bizarre that the Yudkowsky of the current year acts like he's never heard of it! If your actual bottom line is that it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin, then sure, you can <em>totally</em> find something you agree with to write on the lines above! Probably something that "exhibits generally rationalist principles", even! It's just that any rationalist who sees the game you're playing is going to correctly identify you as a partisan hack on this topic and take that into account when deciding whether they can trust you on other topics.</p>
<p>"I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot," Yudkowsky muses (where, presumably, "getting shot" is a metaphor for any undesirable consequence, like being unpopular with progressives). Yes, an astute observation. And any other partisan hack could say exactly the same, for the same reason. Why does the campaign manager withhold the results of the 11th question? Because he doesn't see what the alternative is besides getting shot (being fired from the campaign).</p>
<p>Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings">sometimes</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1456002060084600832">quotes</a> <em>Calvin and Hobbes</em>: "I don't know which is worse, that everyone has his price, or that the price is always so low." If the idea of being fired from the Snodgrass campaign or being unpopular with progressives is so terrifying to you that it seems analogous to getting shot, then sure—say whatever you need to say to keep your job or your popularity, as is personally prudent. You've set your price.</p>
<p>I just—would have hoped that abandoning the intellectual legacy of his Sequences, would be a price too high for such a paltry benefit?</p>
<p>Michael Vassar <a href="https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1221771020534788098">said</a>, "Rationalism starts with the belief that arguments aren't soldiers, and ends with the belief that soldiers are arguments." By accepting that soldiers are arguments ("I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), Yudkowsky is accepting the end of rationalism in this sense. If the price you put on the intellectual integrity of your so-called "rationalist" community is similar to that of the Snodgrass for Mayor campaign, you shouldn't be surprised if intelligent, discerning people accord similar levels of credibility to the two groups' output.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do <em>know</em> they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">as Zvi Mowshowitz points out, the false assertion that "everybody knows" something</a> is typically used to justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex, then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex even when it's extremely relevant.</p>
<p>But if everybody knew, then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech">the appeal of censorship to dictators like Stalin is precisely to maintain a state of not everyone knowing</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DpTexwqYtarRLRBYi/conflict-theory-of-bounded-distrust">For the savvy people in the know, it would certainly be convenient if everyone secretly knew</a>: then the savvy people wouldn't have to face the tough choice between acceding to Power's demands (at the cost of deceiving their readers) and informing their readers (at the cost of incurring Power's wrath).</p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided">Policy debates should not appear one-sided.</a> Faced with this dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really were no options besides deceiving your readers and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers is the right thing to do.</p>
<p>But if you cared about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be sure that those <em>really were</em> the only two options. You'd <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative">spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives</a>—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you <em>explicitly intend to ignore politically unfavorable counterarguments</em>. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion".</p>
<p>I think he's playing dumb here. In other contexts, he's written about <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1634338145016909824">"attack[s] performed by selectively reporting true information"</a> and <a href="https://hpmor.com/chapter/97">"[s]tatements which are technically true but which deceive the listener into forming further beliefs which are false"</a>. He's undoubtedly familiar with the motte-and-bailey doctrine as <a href="https://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf">described by Nicholas Shackel</a> and <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/">popularized by Scott Alexander</a>. I think that if he wanted to, Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of some relevant differences between "2 + 2 = 4" and "the simplest and best protocol is, "<em>He</em> refers to the set of people who have asked us to use <em>he</em>".</p>
<p>If you think it's "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to go out of your way to say positive things about Republican candidates and never, ever say positive things about Democratic candidates (because you live in a red state and "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a Republican shill, even if every sentence you said was true.<sup id="fnref:the-wizard-metz"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:the-wizard-metz">14</a></sup> If you tried to defend yourself against the charge of being a Republican shill by pointing out that you've never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican," that's a nice motte, but you shouldn't expect devoted rationalists to fall for it.</p>
<p>Similarly, when Yudkowsky <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921">wrote in June 2021</a>, "I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much", it was a great motte. I don't doubt the literal motte stated literally.</p>
<p>And yet it seems worth noting that shortly after proclaiming in March 2016 that he was "over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women", he made <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228">a followup post celebrating having caused someone's transition</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."<br>
==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403">later clarified on Twitter</a>, "It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy."</p>
<p>But if Stalin is committed to convincing gender-dysphoric males that they need to cut their dicks off, and you're committed to not disagreeing with Stalin, you <em>shouldn't</em> mostly believe it when gender-dysphoric males thank you for providing the final piece of evidence they needed to realize that they need to cut their dicks off, for the same reason a self-aware Republican shill shouldn't uncritically believe it when people thank him for warning them against Democrat treachery. We know—he's told us very clearly—that Yudkowsky isn't trying to be a neutral purveyor of decision-relevant information on this topic; he's not going to tell us about reasons not to transition. He's playing on a different chessboard.</p>
<h3 id="people-who-are-trying-to-be-people-want-to-improve-their-self-models">People Who Are Trying to Be People Want to Improve Their Self-Models</h3>
<p>"[P]eople do <em>know</em> they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky claims. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? One of the problems with utilitarianism is that it doesn't interact well with game theory. If a policy makes most people better off, at the cost of throwing a few others under the bus, is enacting that policy the right thing to do?</p>
<p>Depending on the details, maybe—but you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I've <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/">been</a> <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/">telling</a> <a href="/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/">you</a> this 85,000-word sob story about how <em>I</em> didn't know, and <em>I'm</em> not better off.</p>
<p><a id="thellim-vs-jane-austen"></a>In <a href="https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508">one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads</a>, Thellim, a woman hailing from <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan">a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan</a>, <a href="https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898">expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in Jane Austen's <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> are, in contrast to what a human being <em>should</em> be</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it. Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim <a href="https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987">redoubles her determination to explain the problem</a>: "<em>She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people.</em>"</p>
<p>Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about "trans" culture in the current year. It actively discourages self-modeling! People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into a gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, <em>&c.</em> are strongly discouraged as hateful and hurtful.</p>
<p>The problem is not that I think there's anything wrong with fantasizing about being the other sex and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with <em>Pride and Prejudice</em> is not her seeing anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.</p>
<p>The <em>problem</em> is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to achieve their goals <em>in reality</em>, do so in a way that involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves, and that's not possible in a culture that tries to ban as heresy the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.</p>
<p>A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like some male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"</p>
<p>It is genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived in the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult (on Earth, and not just dath ilan) should understand—</p>
<p><em>It was a compliment!</em> That receptionist was almost certainly thinking of someone like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie">David Bowie</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard">Eddie Izzard</a>, rather than being hateful. The author should have graciously accepted the compliment and <em>done something to pass better next time</em>.<sup id="fnref:limitations-of-passing"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:limitations-of-passing">15</a></sup> The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's <a href="/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/">hostile</a> <a href="/2022/Feb/link-never-smile-at-an-autogynephile/">stereotype</a> of a narcissistic, gaslighting trans-identified man and snapping out of it.</p>
<p>In a sane world, people would understand that the way to ameliorate the sadness of people who aren't being perceived how they prefer is through things like better and cheaper facial feminization surgery, not <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">emotionally blackmailing</a> people out of their ability to report what they see. I don't <em>want</em> to relinquish <a href="/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf">my ability to notice what women's faces look like</a>, even if that means noticing that mine isn't one. I can endure being sad about that if the alternative is forcing everyone to doublethink around their perceptions of me.</p>
<p>In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there are incentives to relocate our shared concept of "gender" onto things like <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20210513192331/http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/">ornamental clothing</a> that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.</p>
<p>But I would have expected people with an inkling of self-awareness and honesty to notice the incentives, and the problems being created by them, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution, <a href="/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/">whatever that turns out to be</a>?</p>
<p>And if that's too much to expect of the general public—</p>
<p>And if it's too much to expect garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—</p>
<p>Then I would have at least expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to take actions <em>in favor of</em> rather than <em>against</em> his faithful students having these basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... speech? I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not <em>actively exert optimization pressure in the direction of transforming me into a Jane Austen character</em>.</p>
<h3 id="criticism-of-public-statements-is-about-the-public-statements-not-subjective-intent">Criticism of Public Statements Is About the Public Statements, Not Subjective Intent</h3>
<p>This is the part where Yudkowsky or his flunkies accuse me of being uncharitable, of <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435617576495714304">failing at perspective-taking</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1708587781424046242">embracing conspiracy theories</a>. Obviously, Yudkowsky doesn't <em>think of himself</em> as trying to transform his faithful students into Jane Austen characters. Perhaps, then, I have failed to understand his position? <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1435618825198731270">As Yudkowsky put it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Other's theory of themselves usually does not make them look terrible. And you will not have much luck just yelling at them about how they must really be doing <code>terrible_thing</code> instead.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the substance of my complaints is <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie">not about Yudkowsky's conscious subjective narrative</a>. I don't have a lot of uncertainty about Yudkowsky's theory of himself, because he told us that, very clearly: "it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do <em>know</em> they're living in a half-Stalinist environment." I don't doubt that that's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside">how the algorithm feels from the inside</a>.</p>
<p>But my complaint is about the work the algorithm is <em>doing</em> in Stalin's service, not about how it feels; I'm talking about a pattern of publicly visible <em>behavior</em> stretching over years, not claiming to be a mind-reader. (Thus, "take actions" in favor of/against, rather than "be"; "exert optimization pressure in the direction of", rather than "try".) I agree that everyone has a story in which they don't look terrible, and that people mostly believe their own stories, but it does not therefore follow that no one ever does anything terrible.</p>
<p>I agree that you won't have much luck yelling at the Other about how they must really be doing <code>terrible_thing</code>. But if you have the receipts of the Other repeatedly doing the thing in public from 2016 to 2021, maybe yelling about it to everyone else might help <em>them</em> stop getting suckered by the Other's empty posturing.</p>
<p>Let's recap.</p>
<h3 id="recap-of-yudkowskys-history-of-public-statements-on-transgender-identity">Recap of Yudkowsky's History of Public Statements on Transgender Identity</h3>
<p>In January 2009, Yudkowsky published <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">"Changing Emotions"</a>, essentially a revision of <a href="https://archive.is/En6qW">a 2004 mailing list post responding to a man who said that after the Singularity, he'd like to make a female but "otherwise identical" copy of himself</a>. "Changing Emotions" insightfully points out <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard">the deep technical reasons why</a> men who sexually fantasize about being women can't achieve their dream with foreseeable technology—and not only that, but that the dream itself is conceptually confused: a man's fantasy about it being fun to be a woman isn't part of the female distribution; there's a sense in which it <em>can't</em> be fulfilled.</p>
<p>It was a good post! Yudkowsky was merely using the sex change example to illustrate <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard">a more general point about the difficulties of applied transhumanism</a>, but "Changing Emotions" was hugely influential on me; I count myself much better off for having understood the argument.</p>
<p>But seven years later, in a March 2016 Facebook post, Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228">proclaimed that</a> "for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women." </p>
<p>This seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in "Changing Emotions". The two posts weren't <em>necessarily</em> inconsistent, if you assume gender identity is a real property synonymous with "brain sex", and that the harsh (almost mocking) skepticism of the idea of true male-to-female sex change in "Changing Emotions" was directed at the sex-change fantasies of cis men (with a male gender-identity/brain-sex), whereas the 2016 Facebook post was about trans women (with a female gender-identity/brain-sex), which are a different thing.</p>
<p>But this potential unification seemed dubious to me, especially given how the 2016 Facebook post posits that trans women are "at least 20% of the ones with penises" (!) in some population, while the 2004 mailing list post notes that "spending a week as a member of the opposite sex may be a common sexual fantasy". After it's been pointed out, it should be a pretty obvious hypothesis that "guy on the Extropians mailing list in 2004 who fantasizes about having a female but 'otherwise identical' copy of himself" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the <em>same guy</em>. So in October 2016, <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price">I wrote to Yudkowsky noting the apparent reversal and asking to talk about it</a>. Because of the privacy rules I'm adhering to in telling this Whole Dumb Story, I can't confirm or deny whether any such conversation occurred.</p>
<p>Then, in November 2018, while criticizing people who refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns, Yudkowsky <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243">proclaimed that</a> "Using language in a way <em>you</em> dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying" <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">and that</a> "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." But <em>that</em> seemed like a huge and surprising reversal from the position articulated in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">"37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong"</a>.</p>
<p>(And this November 2018 reversal on the philosophy of language was much more inexplicable than the March 2016 reversal on the psychology of sex, because the latter is a complicated empirical question about which reasonable people might read new evidence differently and change their minds. In contrast, there's no plausible good reason for him to have reversed course on whether words can be wrong.)</p>
<p>After attempts to clarify via email failed, I eventually wrote <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"</a> to explain the relevant error in general terms, and Yudkowsky eventually <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228">clarified his position in September 2020</a>.</p>
<p>But then in February 2021, he reopened the discussion to proclaim that "the simplest and best protocol is, '<em>He</em> refers to the set of people who have asked us to use <em>he</em>, with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just <em>is</em> the normative definition", the problems with which post I explained in March 2022's <a href="/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/">"Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal"</a> and above.</p>
<p>End recap.</p>
<h3 id="an-adversarial-game">An Adversarial Game</h3>
<p>At this point, the nature of the game is clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive <em>zeitgeist</em>, subject to the constraint of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#2__The_law_of_no_literal_falsehood_">not writing any sentences he knows to be false</a>. Meanwhile, I want to make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regarding sex and gender, because <em>I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off</em>.</p>
<p>On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."</p>
<p>On "my turn", I put in an absurd amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, <em>exhaustive</em> detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly">perhaps not technically making any unambiguously false atomic statements</a>, was substantively misleading compared to what any serious person would say if they were trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.</p>
<p>At the start, I never expected to end up arguing about the minutiæ of pronoun conventions, which no one would care about if contingencies of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point for things people do care about. The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was trying to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.</p>
<p>In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you prevent an agent from accomplishing a goal via some plan that you find undesirable, the agent will search for ways to route around that restriction, and probably find some plan that you find similarly undesirable for similar reasons.</p>
<p>Suppose you developed an AI to <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness">maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders</a>. It might first try forcibly administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not to forcibly administer any kind of drug, it might switch to forcibly implanting electrodes in humans' brains, or just <em>paying</em> the humans to take heroin, <em>&c.</em></p>
<p>It's the same thing with Yudkowsky's political risk minimization subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. First he comes out with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228">"I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"</a> (March 2016). When you point out that his own writings from seven years before <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">explain why that's not true</a>, then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to <a href="https://archive.is/Iy8Lq">"you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"</a> (November 2018). When you point out that his earlier writings also explain why <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong"><em>that's</em> not true either</a>, he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] <em>into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use</em>" (February 2021). When you point out that <a href="/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/">that's not what's going on</a>, he switches to ... I don't know, but he's a smart guy; in the unlikely event that he sees fit to respond to this post, I'm sure he'll be able to think of something—but at this point, <em>I have no reason to care</em>. Talking to Yudkowsky on topics where getting the right answer would involve acknowledging facts that would make you unpopular in Berkeley is a waste of everyone's time; he has a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line">bottom line</a> that doesn't involve trying to inform you.</p>
<p>Accusing one's interlocutor of bad faith is frowned upon for a reason. We would prefer to live in a world where we have intellectually fruitful object-level discussions under the assumption of good faith, rather than risk our fora degenerating into accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress.</p>
<p>Accordingly, I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing first. I tried it for <em>years</em>. But at some point, I think I should be allowed to notice the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is obviously happening. I think there's some number of years and some number of thousands of words of litigating the object level (about gender) and the meta level (about the philosophy of categorization) after which there's nothing left to do but jump up to the meta-meta level of politics and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why I think I've accumulated enough evidence for the assumption of good faith to have been empirically falsified.<sup id="fnref:symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith">16</a></sup></p>
<p>What makes all of this especially galling is that <em>all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!</em> My thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing or foreseeable technology because of how complicated humans (and therefore human sex differences) are? Not original to me! I <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard">filled in a few technical details</a>, but again, this was in the Sequences as <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">"Changing Emotions"</a>. My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">compress</a> your <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">anticipated experiences</a>? Not original to me! I <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">filled in</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">a few technical details</a>, but <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong"><em>we had a whole Sequence about this.</em></a></p>
<p>Seriously, do you think I'm smart enough to come up with all of this independently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts <em>when he still cared about telling the truth</em>. (Actively telling the truth, and not just technically not lying.) The things I'm hyperfocused on that he thinks are politically impossible to say in the current year are almost entirely things he already said, that anyone could just look up!</p>
<p>I guess the egregore doesn't have the reading comprehension for that?—or rather, the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged by the mob as an Enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're playing the part well enough today, no one cares what you said in 2009?</p>
<p>Does he expect the rest of us not to <em>notice</em>? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?</p>
<p>But I don't think that everybody knows. And I'm not giving up that easily. Not on an entire subculture full of people.</p>
<h3 id="the-battle-that-matters">The Battle That Matters</h3>
<p>In February 2021, Yudkowsky <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356812143849394176">defended his behavior</a> (referring back to <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521">his November 2018 Tweets</a>):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think that some people model civilization as being in the middle of a great battle in which this tweet, even if true, is giving comfort to the Wrong Side, where I would not have been as willing to tweet a truth helping the Right Side. From my perspective, this battle just isn't that close to the top of my priority list. I rated nudging the cognition of the people-I-usually-respect, closer to sanity, as more important; who knows, those people might matter for AGI someday. And the Wrong Side part isn't as clear to me either.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are a number of things that could be said to this,<sup id="fnref:number-of-things"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:number-of-things">17</a></sup> but most importantly: the battle that matters—the battle with a Right Side and a Wrong Side—isn't "pro-trans" <em>vs.</em> "anti-trans". (The central tendency of the contemporary trans rights movement is firmly on the Wrong Side, but that's not the same thing as all trans people as individuals.) That's why Jessica Taylor <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#jessica-joins">joined our posse to try to argue with Yudkowsky in early 2019</a>. (She wouldn't have if my objection had been, "Trans is Wrong; trans people Bad.") That's why Somni—one of the trans women who <a href="https://www.ksro.com/2019/11/18/new-details-in-arrests-of-masked-camp-meeker-protesters/">infamously protested the 2019 CfAR reunion</a> for (among other things) CfAR allegedly discriminating against trans women—<a href="https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind">understands what I've been saying</a>.</p>
<p>The battle that matters—and I've been explicit about this, for years—is over this proposition eloquently <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">stated by Scott Alexander in November 2014</a> (redacting the irrelevant object-level example):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a battle between Feelings and Truth, between Politics and Truth.</p>
<p>In order to take the side of Truth, you need to be able to <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#emperor-norton">tell Joshua Norton that he's not actually Emperor of the United States (even if it hurts him)</a>.</p>
<p>You need to be able to tell a prideful autodidact that the fact that he's failing quizzes in community college differential equations class is evidence that his study methods aren't doing what he thought they were (even if it hurts him).</p>
<p>And you need to be able to say, in public, that trans women are male and trans men are female with respect to a concept of binary sex that encompasses the many traits that aren't affected by contemporary surgical and hormonal interventions (even if it hurts someone who does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, and—yes—even if it probabilistically contributes to that person's suicide).</p>
<p>If you don't want to say those things because hurting people is wrong, then you have chosen Feelings.</p>
<p>Scott Alexander chose Feelings, but I can't hold that against him, because Scott is <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/">explicit about only speaking in the capacity of some guy with a blog</a>.<sup id="fnref:hexaco"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:hexaco">18</a></sup> You can tell that he never wanted to be a religious leader; it just happened because he writes faster than everyone else. I like Scott. Scott is alright. I feel sad that such a large fraction of my interactions with him over the years have taken such an adversarial tone.</p>
<p>Eliezer Yudkowsky did not <em>unambiguously</em> choose Feelings. He's been very careful with his words to strategically mood-affiliate with the side of Feelings, without consciously saying anything that he knows to be unambiguously false. And the reason I can hold it against <em>him</em> is because Eliezer Yudkowsky does not identify as just some guy with a blog. Eliezer Yudkowsky is <em>absolutely</em> trying to be a religious leader. He markets himself a rationality master so superior to mere Earthlings that he might as well be from dath ilan, who <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1384671335146692608">"aspires to make sure [his] departures from perfection aren't noticeable to others"</a>. He <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1509944888376188929">complains that "too many people think it's unvirtuous to shut up and listen to [him]"</a>.</p>
<p>In making such boasts, I think Yudkowsky is opting in to being held to higher standards than other mortals. If Scott Alexander gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, that's disappointing, but I'm not the victim of false advertising, because Scott Alexander doesn't claim to be anything more than some guy with a blog. If I trusted him more than that, that's on me.</p>
<p>If Eliezer Yudkowsky gets something wrong when I was trusting him to be right, and refuses to acknowledge corrections (in the absence of an unsustainable 21-month nagging campaign), and keeps inventing new galaxy-brained ways to be wrong in the service of his political agenda of being seen to agree with Stalin without technically lying, then I think I <em>am</em> the victim of false advertising.<sup id="fnref:gould-analogy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:gould-analogy">19</a></sup> His marketing bluster was designed to trick people like me into trusting him, even if my being dumb enough to believe him is on me.<sup id="fnref:gullible"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:gullible">20</a></sup></p>
<p>Perhaps he thinks it's unreasonable for someone to hold him to higher standards. As he <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356493883094441984">wrote</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494097511370752">on</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356494399945854976">Twitter</a> in February 2021:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It's strange and disingenuous to pretend that the master truthseekers of any age of history, must all have been blurting out everything they knew in public, at all times, on pain of not possibly being able to retain their Art otherwise. I doubt Richard Feynman was like that. More likely is that, say, he tried to avoid telling outright lies or making public confusions worse, but mainly got by on having a much-sharper-than-average dividing line in his mine between peer pressure against saying something, and that thing being <em>false</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I've read <em>Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman</em>. I cannot imagine Richard Feynman trying to get away with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" excuse. I think if there were topics Richard Feynman didn't think he could afford to be honest about, he—or really, anyone who valued their intellectual integrity more than their image as a religious authority fit to issue proclamations about all areas of life—would just not issue sweeping public statements on that topic while claiming the right to ignore counterarguments on the grounds of having "some confidence in [their] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [themself] before speaking".</p>
<p>The claim to not be making public confusions worse might be credible if there were no comparable public figures doing better. But other science educators in the current year such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments">Richard Dawkins</a>, University of Chicago professor <a href="https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/08/27/on-helen-joyces-trans/">Jerry Coyne</a>, or ex-Harvard professor <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/carole-hooven-why-i-left-harvard">Carole Hooven</a> <em>have</em> been willing to stand up for the scientific truth that biological sex continues to be real even when it hurts people's feelings.</p>
<p>If Yudkowsky thinks he's too important for that (because his popularity with progressives has much greater impact on the history of Earth-originating intelligent life than Carole Hooven's), that might be the right act-consequentialist decision, but one of the consequences he should be tracking is that he's forfeiting the trust of everyone who expected him to live up to the basic epistemic standards successfully upheld by biology professors.</p>
<p>It <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/">looks foolish in retrospect</a>, but I did trust him much more than that. Back in 2009 when <em>Less Wrong</em> was new, we had a thread of hyperbolic <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts">"Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts"</a> (in the style of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts">Chuck Norris facts</a>). <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts/comment/Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND">"Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line"</a>, said one of the facts—and back then, I didn't think I would <em>need</em> to.</p>
<p>Part of what made him so trustworthy back then was that he wasn't asking for trust. He clearly <em>did</em> think it was <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t6Fe2PsEwb3HhcBEr/the-litany-against-gurus">unvirtuous to just shut up and listen to him</a>: "I'm not sure that human beings realistically <em>can</em> trust and think at the same time," <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science">he wrote</a>. He was always arrogant, but it was tempered by the expectation of being held to account by arguments rather than being deferred to as a social superior. "I try in general to avoid sending my brain signals which tell it that I am high-status, just in case that causes my brain to decide it is no longer necessary," <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why">he wrote</a>.</p>
<p>He visibly <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anCubLdggTWjnEvBS/your-rationality-is-my-business">cared about other people being in touch with reality</a>. "I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before," <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY">he wrote</a>. (I can testify that this is true: while sharing a car ride with Anna Salamon in 2011, he told me I had B.O.)<sup id="fnref:bo-heroism"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:bo-heroism">21</a></sup></p>
<p>That person is dead now, even if his body is still breathing. Without disclosing any specific content from private conversations that may or may not have happened, I think he knows it.</p>
<p>If the caliph has lost his <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/duvzdffTzL3dWJcxn/believing-in-1">belief in</a> the power of intellectual honesty, I can't necessarily say he's wrong on the empirical merits. It is written that our world is <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god">beyond the reach of God</a>; there's no law of physics that says honesty must yield better consequences than propaganda.</p>
<p>But since I haven't lost my belief in honesty, I have the responsibility to point out that the formerly rightful caliph has relinquished his Art and lost his powers.</p>
<p>The modern Yudkowsky <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I notice that this advice fails to highlight the possibility that the "seems to believe" is a deliberate show (judged to be personally prudent and not community-harmful), rather than a misperception on your part. I am left shaking my head in a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away">weighted average of</a> sadness about the mortal frailty of my former hero, and disgust at his duplicity. <strong>If Eliezer Yudkowsky can't <em>unambiguously</em> choose Truth over Feelings, <em>then Eliezer Yudkowsky is a fraud</em>.</strong></p>
<p>A few clarifications are in order here. First, this usage of "fraud" isn't a meaningless <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights">boo light</a>. I specifically and <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/">literally mean it</a> in <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud"><em>Merriam-Webster</em>'s sense 2.a., "a person who is not what he or she pretends to be"</a>—and I think I've made my case. (The "epistemic hero" posturing isn't compatible with the "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" prevarication; he needs to choose one or the other.) Someone who disagrees with my assessment needs to argue that I've gotten some specific thing wrong, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pkaagE6LAsGummWNv/contra-yudkowsky-on-epistemic-conduct-for-author-criticism">rather than objecting to character attacks on procedural grounds</a>.</p>
<p>Second, it's a conditional: <em>if</em> Yudkowsky can't unambiguously choose Truth over Feelings, <em>then</em> he's a fraud. If he wanted to come clean, he could do so at any time.</p>
<p>He probably won't. We've already seen from his behavior that he doesn't give a shit what people like me think of his intellectual integrity. Why would that change?</p>
<p>Third, given that "fraud" is a semantically meaningful description rather than an emotive negative evaluation, I should stress that evaluation is a separate step. If being a fraud were necessary for saving the world, maybe being a fraud would be the right thing to do? More on this in the next post. (To be continued.)</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:sloppy">
<p>It was unevenly sloppy of the <em>Times</em> to link the first post, <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/23/three-great-articles-on-poverty-and-why-i-disagree-with-all-of-them/">"Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them"</a>, but not the second, <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/">"Against Murderism"</a>—especially since "Against Murderism" is specifically about Alexander's skepticism of <em>racism</em> as an explanatory concept and therefore contains objectively more damning sentences to quote out of context than a passing reference to Charles Murray. Apparently, the <em>Times</em> couldn't even be bothered to smear Scott with misconstruals of his actual ideas, if guilt by association did the trick with less effort on the part of both journalist and reader. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:sloppy" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:murray-alignment">
<p>As far as aligning himself with Murray more generally, it's notable that Alexander had tapped Murray for Welfare Czar in <a href="https://archive.vn/xu7PX">a hypothetical "If I were president" Tumblr post</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:murray-alignment" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:bet">
<p>It's just—how much do you want to bet on that? How much do you think <em>Scott</em> wants to bet? <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bet" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:murray-caveat">
<p>For example, the introductory summary for Ch. 13 of <em>The Bell Curve</em>, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", states: "Even if the differences between races were entirely genetic (which they surely are not), it should make no practical difference in how individuals deal with each other." <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:murray-caveat" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:logical-induction">
<p>I've wondered how hard it would have been to come up with MIRI's <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03543">logical induction result</a> (which describes an asymptotic algorithm for estimating the probabilities of mathematical truths in terms of a betting market composed of increasingly complex traders) in the Soviet Union. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:logical-induction" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:deny-everything">
<p>In January 2023, when Nick Bostrom <a href="https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf">preemptively apologized for a 26-year-old email to the Extropians mailing list</a> that referenced the IQ gap and mentioned a slur, he had <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi">some</a> <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8zLwD862MRGZTzs8k/a-personal-response-to-nick-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old">detractors</a> and a <a href="https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/Riqg9zDhnsxnFrdXH/nick-bostrom-should-step-down-as-director-of-fhi/comment/h9gdA4snagQf7bPDv">few</a> <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NniTsDNQQo58hnxkr/my-thoughts-on-bostrom-s-apology-for-an-old-email">defenders</a>, but I don't recall seeing much defense of the 1996 email itself.</p>
<p>But if you're <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-reason-everyone-and-her-dog-is-still-mad">familiar with the literature</a> and understand the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction">use–mention distinction</a>, the literal claims in <a href="https://nickbostrom.com/oldemail.pdf">the original email</a> are entirely reasonable. (There are additional things one could say about <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts">what prosocial functions are being served by</a> the taboos against what the younger Bostrom called "the provocativeness of unabashed objectivity", which would make for fine mailing-list replies, but the original email can't be abhorrent simply for failing to anticipate all possible counterarguments.)</p>
<p>I didn't speak up at the time of the old-email scandal, either. I had other things to do with my attention and Overton budget. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:deny-everything" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:survey-data">
<p>We go from 89.2% male in the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results">2011 <em>Less Wrong</em> survey</a> to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/">2020 <em>Slate Star Codex</em> survey</a>—although the <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics">2020 EA survey</a> says only 71% male, so it depends on how you draw the category boundaries of "we." <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:survey-data" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:brennan-condemnation-edits">
<p>The post was subsequently edited a number of times in ways that I don't think are relevant to my discussion here. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:brennan-condemnation-edits" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:no-promises">
<p>It seems notable (though I didn't note it at the time of my comment) that Brennan didn't break any promises. In <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857">Brennan's account</a>, Alexander "did not first say 'can I tell you something in confidence?' or anything like that." Scott unilaterally said in the email, "I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by 'appreciate', I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge", but we have no evidence that Topher agreed.</p>
<p>To see why the lack of a promise is potentially significant, imagine if someone were guilty of a serious crime (like murder or <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy">stealing billions of dollars of their customers' money</a>) and unilaterally confessed to an acquaintance but added, "Never tell anyone I said this, or I'll seek some sort of horrible revenge." In that case, I think more people's moral intuitions would side with the reporter. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:no-promises" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:challenges-title">
<p>The title is an allusion to Yudkowsky's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S7csET9CgBtpi7sCh/challenges-to-christiano-s-capability-amplification-proposal">"Challenges to Christiano's Capability Amplification Proposal"</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:challenges-title" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:pronoun-roles">
<p>If the problem is with the pronoun implying stereotypes and social roles in the language as spoken, such that another pronoun should be considered more correct despite the lack of corresponding hair color, you should be making that case on the empirical merits, not appealing to hypothetical surgeries. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:pronoun-roles" title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:the-form-of-the-inference">
<p>Note, I'm specifically praising the <em>form</em> of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about themself, and concluded that they <em>are</em> trans in some specific objective sense on the empirical merits, that would also be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-atypical same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">first approximation</a>. It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michelle Alleva, the story doesn't <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">pay rent</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:the-form-of-the-inference" title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:motivatedly-inaccurate">
<p>The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain">Robin Hanson</a> for years! <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:motivatedly-inaccurate" title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:the-wizard-metz">
<p>It's instructive to consider that <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly/comment/9YkXk43b4LC4vaCTs">Cade Metz could just as credibly offer the same excuse</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:the-wizard-metz" title="Jump back to footnote 14 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:limitations-of-passing">
<p>Also, passing as a woman isn't the same thing as actually being female. But expecting people to accept an imitation as the real thing <em>without the imitation even succeeding at resembling the real thing</em> is seriously nuts. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:limitations-of-passing" title="Jump back to footnote 15 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith">
<p>Obviously, if we're abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I <em>think</em> I'm adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly mendaciously arrogant to claim "confidence in my own ability to independently invent everything important" (!) about my topics of interest. If Yudkowsky or anyone else thinks they have a case that <em>I'm</em> being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:symmetrically-not-assuming-good-faith" title="Jump back to footnote 16 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:number-of-things">
<p>Note the striking contrast between <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument">"A Rational Argument"</a>, in which the Yudkowsky of 2007 wrote that a campaign manager "crossed the line [between rationality and rationalization] at the point where [they] considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to [their] candidate, before deciding whether to publish it", and these 2021 Tweets, in which Yudkowsky seems nonchalant about "not hav[ing] been as willing to tweet a truth helping" one side of a cultural dispute, because "this battle just isn't that close to the top of [his] priority list". Well, sure! Any hired campaign manager could say the same: helping the electorate make an optimally informed decision just isn't that close to the top of their priority list, compared to getting paid.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky's claim to have been focused on nudging people's cognition towards sanity seems dubious: if you're focused on sanity, you should be spontaneously noticing sanity errors in both political camps. (Moreover, if you're living in what you yourself describe as a "half-Stalinist environment", you should expect your social environment to make proportionately more errors on the "pro-Stalin" side, because Stalinists aren't facing social pressure to avoid errors.) As for the rationale that "those people might matter to AGI someday", <a href="/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/">judging by local demographics</a>, it seems much more likely to apply to trans women themselves than their critics! <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:number-of-things" title="Jump back to footnote 17 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:hexaco">
<p>The authors of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEXACO_model_of_personality_structure">HEXACO personality model</a> may have gotten something importantly right in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honesty-humility_factor_of_the_HEXACO_model_of_personality">grouping "honesty" and "humility" as a single factor</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:hexaco" title="Jump back to footnote 18 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:gould-analogy">
<p>Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BahoNzY2pzSeM2Dtk/beware-of-stephen-j-gould">once wrote of Stephen Jay Gould</a> that "[c]onsistently self-serving scientific 'error', in the face of repeated correction and without informing others of the criticism, blends over into scientific fraud." I think the same standard applies here. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:gould-analogy" title="Jump back to footnote 19 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:gullible">
<p>Perhaps some readers will consider this point to be more revealing about my character rather than Yudkowsky's: that <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">everybody knows</a> his bluster wasn't supposed to be taken seriously, so I have no more right to complain about "false advertising" than purchasers of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery">"World's Best"</a> ice-cream who are horrified (or pretending to be) that it may not objectively be the best in the world.</p>
<p>Such readers may have a point. If <em>you</em> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info">already knew</a> that Yudkowsky's pose of epistemic superiority was phony (because everyone knows), then you are wiser than I was. But I think there are a lot of people in the "rationalist" subculture who didn't know (because we weren't anyone). This post is for their benefit. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:gullible" title="Jump back to footnote 20 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:bo-heroism">
<p>A lot of the epistemic heroism here is just in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing">noticing</a> the conflict between Feelings and Truth, between Politeness and Truth, rather than necessarily acting on it. If telling a person they smell bad would predictably meet harsh social punishment, I couldn't blame someone for consciously choosing silence and safety over telling the truth.</p>
<p>What I can and do blame someone for is actively fighting for Feelings while misrepresenting himself as the rightful caliph of epistemic rationality. There are a lot of trans people who would benefit from feedback that they don't pass but aren't getting that feedback by default. I wouldn't necessarily expect Yudkowsky to provide it. (I don't, either.) I <em>would</em> expect the person who wrote the Sequences not to proclaim that the important thing is the feelings of people who do not like to be tossed into a Smells Bad bucket, which don't bear on the factual question of whether someone smells bad. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:bo-heroism" title="Jump back to footnote 21 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them2023-12-30T09:35:00-08:002023-12-30T09:35:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-12-30:/2023/Dec/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them/<blockquote>
<p>"—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?"</p>
<p>I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word <em>community</em>, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as <em>the [rationalist] community</em>, I'm certainly not a …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>"—but if one hundred thousand [normies] can turn up, to show their support for the [rationalist] community, why can't you?"</p>
<p>I said wearily, "Because every time I hear the word <em>community</em>, I know I'm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as <em>the [rationalist] community</em>, I'm certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don't want to spend my life watching [<em>rationalist and effective altruist</em>] television channels, using [<em>rationalist and effective altruist</em>] news systems ... or going to [<em>rationalist and effective altruist</em>] street parades. It's all so ... proprietary. You'd think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on [truth and goodness]. And if you don't <em>market the product</em> their way, you're some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized [nerd]."</p>
<p>—"Cocoon" by Greg Egan (paraphrased)<sup id="fnref:egan-paraphrasing"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:egan-paraphrasing">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far: in a previous post, <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"</a>, I told you about how I've always (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and how I used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky which <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">incidentally pointed out how absurdly impossible my obsessive fantasy was</a> ...</p>
<p>—none of which gooey private psychological minutiæ would be in the public interest to blog about, except that, as I explained in a subsequent post, <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/">"Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"</a>, around 2016, everyone in the community that formed around the Sequences suddenly decided that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and the cognitive dissonance from having to rebut all this nonsense coming from everyone I used to trust drove me <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">temporarily</a> <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">insane</a> from stress and sleep deprivation ...</p>
<p>—which would have been the end of the story, except that, as I explained in a subsequent–subsequent post, <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/">"A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning"</a>, in late 2018, Eliezer Yudkowsky prevaricated about his own philosophy of language in a way that suggested that people were philosophically confused if they disputed that men could be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense.</p>
<p>Anyone else being wrong on the internet like that wouldn't have seemed like a big deal, but Scott Alexander had <a href="http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html">semi-jokingly</a> written that <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/">rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph</a>. After extensive attempts by me and allies to get clarification from Yudkowsky amounted to nothing, we felt justified in concluding that he and his Caliphate of so-called "rationalists" was corrupt.</p>
<div class="toc"><span class="toctitle">Table of Contents</span><ul>
<li><a href="#origins-of-the-rationalist-civil-war-aprilmay-2019">Origins of the Rationalist Civil War (April–May 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#exit-wounds-may-2019">Exit Wounds (May 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#squabbling-on-and-with-lesswrongcom-mayjuly-2019">Squabbling On and With lesswrong.com (May–July 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-beleaguered-ally-under-fire-julyaugust-2019">A Beleaguered Ally Under Fire (July–August 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#an-poignant-to-me-anecdote-that-fits-here-chronologically-but-doesnt-particularly-foreshadow-anything-august-2019">An Poignant-to-Me Anecdote That Fits Here Chronologically But Doesn't Particularly Foreshadow Anything (August 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#philosophy-blogging-interlude-augustoctober-2019">Philosophy Blogging Interlude! (August–October 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#the-caliphs-madness-august-and-november-2019">The Caliph's Madness (August and November 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-worthy-critic-at-last-november-2019">A Worthy Critic At Last (November 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#writers-block-november-2019">Writer's Block (November 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#interactions-with-a-different-rationalist-splinter-group-novemberdecember-2019">Interactions With a Different Rationalist Splinter Group (November–December 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#philosophy-blogging-interlude-2-december-2019">Philosophy Blogging Interlude 2! (December 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-newtonmas-party-december-2019">A Newtonmas Party (December 2019)</a></li>
<li><a href="#further-discourses-on-what-the-categories-were-made-for-januaryfebruary-2020">Further Discourses on What the Categories Were Made For (January–February 2020)</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-private-document-about-a-disturbing-hypothesis-early-2020">A Private Document About a Disturbing Hypothesis (early 2020)</a></li>
<li><a href="#the-new-york-times-pounces-june-2020">The New York Times Pounces (June 2020)</a></li>
<li><a href="#philosophy-blogging-interlude-3-mid-2020">Philosophy Blogging Interlude 3! (mid-2020)</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-couple-of-impulsive-emails-september-2020">A Couple of Impulsive Emails (September 2020)</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-private-catastrophe-december-2020">A Private Catastrophe (December 2020)</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-false-denouement-january-2021">A False Dénouement (January 2021)</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<h3 id="origins-of-the-rationalist-civil-war-aprilmay-2019">Origins of the Rationalist Civil War (April–May 2019)</h3>
<p>Anyway, given that the "rationalists" were fake and that we needed something better, there remained the question of what to do about that, and how to relate to the old thing.</p>
<p>I had been hyperfocused on prosecuting my Category War, but the reason Michael Vassar and Ben Hoffman and Jessica Taylor<sup id="fnref:posse-boundary"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:posse-boundary">2</a></sup> were willing to help me out was not because they particularly cared about the gender and categories example but because it seemed like a manifestation of a more general problem of epistemic rot in "the community."</p>
<p>Ben had previously worked at GiveWell and had written a lot about problems with the Effective Altruism (EA) movement; in particular, he argued that EA-branded institutions were making <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/givewell-and-partial-funding/">incoherent</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/">decisions</a> under the influence of incentives to <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/humility-argument-honesty/">distort</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/">information</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/">in order to</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-neglectedness/">seek</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/against-responsibility/">power</a>.</p>
<p>Jessica had previously worked at MIRI, where she was unnerved by what she saw as under-evidenced paranoia about information hazards and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam">short AI timelines</a>. (As Jack Gallagher, who was also at MIRI at the time, <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards/comment/TcsXh44pB9xRziGgt">later put it</a>, "A bunch of people we respected and worked with had decided the world was going to end, very soon, uncomfortably soon, and they were making it extremely difficult for us to check their work.")</p>
<p>To what extent were my gender and categories thing, and Ben's EA thing, and Jessica's MIRI thing, manifestations of the same underlying problem? Or had we all become disaffected with the mainstream "rationalists" for our own idiosyncratic reasons, and merely randomly fallen into each other's, and Michael's, orbit?</p>
<p>If there was a real problem, I didn't have a good grasp on it. Cultural critique is a fraught endeavor: if someone tells an outright lie, you can, maybe, with a lot of effort, prove that to other people and get a correction on that specific point. (Although as we had just discovered, even that might be too much to hope for.) But culture is the sum of lots and lots of little micro-actions by lots and lots of people. If your entire culture has visibly departed from the Way that was taught to you in the late 'aughts, how do you demonstrate that to people who are acting like they don't remember the old Way, or that they don't think anything has changed, or that they notice some changes but think the new way is better? It's not as simple as shouting, "Hey guys, Truth matters!" Any ideologue or religious person would agree with <em>that</em>. It's not feasible to litigate every petty epistemic crime in something someone said, and if you tried, someone who thought the culture was basically on track could accuse you of cherry-picking. If "culture" is a real thing at all—and it certainly seems to be—we are condemned to grasp it unclearly, relying on the brain's pattern-matching faculties to sum over thousands of little micro-actions as a <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gestalt"><em>gestalt</em></a>.</p>
<p>Ben called the <em>gestalt</em> he saw the Blight, after the rogue superintelligence in Vernor Vinge's <em>A Fire Upon the Deep</em>. The problem wasn't that people were getting dumber; it was that they were increasingly behaving in a way that was better explained by their political incentives than by coherent beliefs about the world; they were using and construing facts as moves in a power game, albeit sometimes subject to genre constraints under which only true facts were admissible moves in the game.</p>
<p>When I asked Ben for specific examples of MIRI or CfAR leaders behaving badly, he gave the example of <a href="https://intelligence.org/2015/12/11/openai-and-other-news/">MIRI executive director Nate Soares posting that he was "excited to see OpenAI joining the space"</a>, despite the fact that <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/"><em>no one</em> who had been following the AI risk discourse</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/openai-makes-humanity-less-safe/">thought that OpenAI as originally announced was a good idea</a>. Nate <a href="https://twitter.com/jessi_cata/status/1462454555925434375">had privately clarified that</a> the word "excited" wasn't necessarily meant positively—and in this case meant something more like "terrified."</p>
<p>This seemed to me like the sort of thing where a particularly principled (naïve?) person might say, "That's <em>lying for political reasons!</em> That's <em>contrary to the moral law!</em>" and most ordinary grown-ups would say, "Why are you so upset about this? That sort of strategic phrasing in press releases is just how the world works."</p>
<p>I thought explaining the Blight to an ordinary grown-up was going to need either lots of specific examples that were more egregious than this (and more egregious than the examples in Sarah Constantin's <a href="https://srconstantin.github.io/2017/01/17/ea-has-a-lying-problem.html">"EA Has a Lying Problem"</a> or Ben's <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/">"Effective Altruism Is Self-Recommending"</a>), or somehow convincing the ordinary grown-up why "just how the world works" isn't good enough, and why we needed one goddamned place in the entire goddamned world with unusually high standards.</p>
<p>The schism introduced new pressures on my social life. I told Michael that I still wanted to be friends with people on both sides of the factional schism. Michael said that we should unambiguously regard Yudkowsky and CfAR president (and my personal friend of ten years) Anna Salamon as criminals or enemy combatants who could claim no rights in regard to me or him.</p>
<p>I don't think I got the framing at this time. War metaphors sounded scary and mean: I didn't want to shoot my friends! But the point of the analogy (which Michael explained, but I wasn't ready to hear until I did a few more weeks of emotional processing) was specifically that soldiers on the other side of a war aren't necessarily morally blameworthy as individuals:<sup id="fnref:soldiers"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:soldiers">3</a></sup> their actions are being directed by the Power they're embedded in.</p>
<p>I wrote to Anna (Subject: "Re: the end of the Category War (we lost?!?!?!)"):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was <em>just</em> trying to publicly settle a <em>very straightforward</em> philosophy thing that seemed <em>really solid</em> to me</p>
<p>if, in the process, I accidentally ended up being an unusually useful pawn in Michael Vassar's deranged four-dimensional hyperchess political scheming</p>
<p>that's ... <em>arguably</em> not my fault</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>I may have subconsciously pulled off an interesting political maneuver. In my final email to Yudkowsky on 20 April 2019 (Subject: "closing thoughts from me"), I had written—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we can't even get a public consensus from our <em>de facto</em> leadership on something <em>so basic</em> as "concepts need to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic predictions about reality", then, in my view, there's <em>no point in pretending to have a rationalist community</em>, and I need to leave and go find something else to do (perhaps whatever Michael's newest scheme turns out to be). I don't think I'm setting <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining">my price for joining</a> particularly high here?<sup id="fnref:my-price-for-joining"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:my-price-for-joining">4</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>And as it happened, on 4 May 2019, Yudkowsky <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1124751630937681922">retweeted Colin Wright on the "univariate fallacy"</a>—the point that group differences <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1">aren't a matter of any single variable</a>—which was thematically similar to the clarification I had been asking for. (Empirically, it made me feel less aggrieved.) Was I wrong to interpret this as <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#proton-concession">another "concession" to me</a>? (Again, notwithstanding that the whole mindset of extracting "concessions" was corrupt and not what our posse was trying to do.)</p>
<p>Separately, one evening in April, I visited the house where "Meredith" and her husband Mike and Kelsey Piper and some other people lived, which I'll call "Arcadia".<sup id="fnref:named-houses"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:named-houses">5</a></sup> I said, essentially, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_eMvgNrQQE">Oh man oh jeez</a>, Ben and Michael want me to join in a rationalist civil war against the corrupt mainstream-rationality establishment, and I'd really rather not, and I don't like how they keep using scary hyperbolic words like 'cult' and 'war' and 'criminal', but on the other hand, they're the only ones backing me up on this incredibly basic philosophy thing and I don't feel like I have anywhere else to go." This culminated in a group conversation with the entire house, which I found unsettling. (Unfortunately, I didn't take notes and don't remember the details except that I had a sense of everyone else seeming to agree on things that I thought were clearly contrary to the spirit of the Sequences.)</p>
<p>The two-year-old son of Mike and "Meredith" was reportedly saying the next day that Kelsey doesn't like his daddy, which was confusing until it was figured out he had heard Kelsey talking about why she doesn't like Michael <em>Vassar</em>.<sup id="fnref:mike-pseudonym"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:mike-pseudonym">6</a></sup></p>
<p>And as it happened, on 7 May 2019, Kelsey wrote <a href="/images/piper-spending_social_capital_on_talking_about_trans_issues.png">a Facebook comment displaying evidence of understanding my thesis</a>.</p>
<p>These two datapoints led me to a psychological hypothesis: when people see someone wavering between their coalition and a rival coalition, they're intuitively motivated to offer a few concessions to keep the wavering person on their side. Kelsey could afford to <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#people-who-would-get-surgery-to-have-the-ideal-female-body">speak as if she didn't understand the thing about sex being a natural category</a> when it was just me freaking out alone, but visibly got it almost as soon as I could credibly threaten to <em>walk</em> (defect to a coalition of people she dislikes). Maybe my "closing thoughts" email had a similar effect on Yudkowsky, assuming he otherwise wouldn't have spontaneously tweeted something about the univariate fallacy two weeks later? This probably wouldn't work if you repeated it, or tried to do it consciously?</p>
<h3 id="exit-wounds-may-2019">Exit Wounds (May 2019)</h3>
<p>I started drafting a "why I've been upset for five months and have lost faith in the so-called 'rationalist' community" memoir-post. Ben said that the target audience to aim for was sympathetic but naïve people like I had been a few years ago, who hadn't yet had the experiences I'd had. This way, they wouldn't have to freak out to the point of <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">being imprisoned</a> and demand help from community leaders and not get it; they could just learn from me.</p>
<p>I didn't know how to continue it. I was too psychologically constrained; I didn't know how to tell the Whole Dumb Story without escalating personal conflicts or leaking info from private conversations.</p>
<p>I decided to take a break from the religious civil war <a href="/2019/May/hiatus/">and from this blog</a>. I <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/may-is-math-and-wellness-month/">declared May 2019 as Math and Wellness Month</a>.</p>
<p>My dayjob performance had been suffering for months. The psychology of the workplace is ... subtle. There's a phenomenon where some people are vastly more productive than others and everyone knows it, but no one is cruel enough <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/">to make it common knowledge</a>. This is awkward for people who simultaneously benefit from the culture of common-knowledge-prevention allowing them to collect the status and money <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent">rents</a> of being a $150K/year software engineer without actually <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/12/fortune/">performing at that level</a>, who also <a href="/2017/Sep/neither-as-plea-nor-as-despair/">read enough Ayn Rand as a teenager</a> to be ideologically opposed to subsisting on unjustly-acquired rents rather than value creation. I didn't think the company would fire me, but I was worried that they <em>should</em>.</p>
<p>I asked my boss to temporarily assign me some easier tasks that I could make steady progress on. (We had a lot of LaTeX templating of insurance policy amendments that needed to get done.) If I was going to be psychologically impaired, it was better to be up-front about how I could best serve the company given that impairment, rather than hoping the boss wouldn't notice.</p>
<p>My intent of a break from the religious war didn't take. I met with Anna on the UC Berkeley campus and read her excerpts from Ben's and Jessica's emails. (She had not provided a comment on <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"</a> despite my requests, including in the form of two paper postcards that I stayed up until 2 <em>a.m.</em> on 14 April 2019 writing; spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding postcards felt more distinctive than spamming people with hysterical and somewhat demanding emails.)</p>
<p>I complained that I had believed our own <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aFEsqd6ofwnkNqaXo/go-forth-and-create-the-art">marketing</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jP583FwKepjiWbeoQ/epistle-to-the-new-york-less-wrongians">material</a> about the "rationalists" remaking the world by wielding a hidden Bayesian structure of Science and Reason that applies <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory">outside the laboratory</a>. Was that all a lie? Were we not trying to do the thing anymore? Anna was dismissive: she thought that the idea I had gotten about "the thing" was never actually part of the original vision. She kept repeating that she had tried to warn me, and I didn't listen. (Back in the late 'aughts, she had often recommended Paul Graham's essay <a href="http://paulgraham.com/say.html">"What You Can't Say"</a> to people, summarizing Graham's moral that you should figure out the things you can't say in your culture and then not say them, in order to avoid getting drawn into pointless conflicts.)</p>
<p>It was true that she had tried to warn me for years, and (not yet having gotten over <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism">my teenage ideological fever dream</a>), I hadn't known how to listen. But this seemed fundamentally unresponsive to how <em>I</em> kept repeating that I only expected consensus on the basic philosophy of language and categorization (not my object-level special interest in sex and gender). Why was it so unrealistic to imagine that the smart people could <a href="https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies.html">enforce standards</a> in our own tiny little bubble?</p>
<p>My frustration bubbled out into follow-up emails:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm also still pretty <em>angry</em> about how your response to my "I believed our own propaganda" complaint is (my possibly-unfair paraphrase) "what you call 'propaganda' was all in your head; we were never <em>actually</em> going to do the unrestricted truthseeking thing when it was politically inconvenient." But ... no! <strong>I <em>didn't</em> just make up the propaganda! The hyperlinks still work! I didn't imagine them! They were real! You can still click on them:</strong> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible">"A Sense That More Is Possible"</a>, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline">"Raising the Sanity Waterline"</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I added:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Can you please <em>acknowledge that I didn't just make this up?</em> Happy to pay you $200 for a reply to this email within the next 72 hours</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anna said she didn't want to receive <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price">cheerful price</a> offers from me anymore; previously, she had regarded my occasionally throwing money at her to bid for her scarce attention<sup id="fnref:money-attitudes"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:money-attitudes">7</a></sup> as good-faith libertarianism between consenting adults, but now she was afraid that if she accepted, it would be portrayed in some future Ben Hoffman essay as an instance of her <em>using</em> me. She agreed that someone could have gotten the ideals I had gotten out of those posts, but there was also evidence from that time pointing the other way (<em>e.g.</em>, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer">"Politics Is the Mind-Killer"</a>) and it shouldn't be surprising if people steered clear of controversy.</p>
<p>I replied: but when forming the original let's-be-apolitical vision in 2008, we did not anticipate that whether I should cut my dick off would <em>become</em> a political issue. That was new evidence about whether the original vision was wise! I wasn't particularly trying to do politics with my idiosyncratic special interest; I was trying to think seriously about the most important thing in my life and only do the minimum amount of politics necessary to protect my ability to think. If 2019-era "rationalists" were going to commit an epistemology mistake that interfered with my ability to think seriously about the most important thing in my life, and they couldn't correct the mistake even after it was pointed out, then the "rationalists" were worse than useless to me. This probably didn't matter causally (I wasn't an AI researcher, therefore I didn't matter), but it might matter timelessly (if I were part of <a href="/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/">a reference class that included AI researchers</a>).</p>
<p>Fundamentally, I was skeptical that you <em>could</em> do consistently high-grade reasoning as a group without committing heresy, because of the mechanism that Yudkowsky had described in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies">"Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies"</a> and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology">"Dark Side Epistemology"</a>: the need to lie about lying and cover up cover-ups propagates recursively. Anna was unusually skillful at thinking things without saying them; I thought people facing similar speech restrictions generally just get worse at thinking (plausibly<sup id="fnref:plausibly"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:plausibly">8</a></sup> including Yudkowsky), and the problem gets worse as the group effort scales. (It's less risky to recommend <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html">"What You Can't Say"</a> to your housemates than to put it on your 501(c)(3) organization's canonical reading list.) You can't optimize your group's culture for not talking about atheism without also optimizing against understanding <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor">Occam's razor</a>; you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">37 ways that words can be wrong</a>.</p>
<h3 id="squabbling-on-and-with-lesswrongcom-mayjuly-2019">Squabbling On and With <em>lesswrong.com</em> (May–July 2019)</h3>
<p>Despite Math and Wellness Month and my intent to take a break from the religious civil war, I kept reading <em>Less Wrong</em> during May 2019, and ended up scoring a couple of victories in the civil war (at some cost to Wellness).</p>
<p>MIRI researcher Scott Garrabrant wrote a post about how <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5TwJ9BGxcgh5DsmQ/yes-requires-the-possibility-of-no">"Yes Requires the Possibility of No"</a>. Information-theoretically, a signal sent with probability one transmits no information: you can only learn something from hearing a "Yes" if you believed that the answer could have been "No". I saw an analogy to my philosophy-of-language thesis, and mentioned it in a comment: if you want to believe that <em>x</em> belongs to category <em>C</em>, you might try redefining <em>C</em> in order to make the question "Is <em>x</em> a <em>C</em>?" come out "Yes", but you can only do so at the expense of making <em>C</em> less useful. Meaningful category-membership (Yes) requires the possibility of non-membership (No).</p>
<p>Someone <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/FxSZwECjhgYE7p2du">objected that</a> she found it "unpleasant that [I] always bring [my] hobbyhorse in, but in an 'abstract' way that doesn't allow discussing the actual object level question"; it made her feel "attacked in a way that allow[ed] for no legal recourse to defend [herself]." I <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/32GPaijsSwX2NSFJi">replied</a> that that was understandable, but that I found it unpleasant that our standard Bayesian philosophy of language somehow got politicized, such that my attempts to do correct epistemology were perceived as attacking people. Such a trainwreck ensued that the mods manually <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019">moved the comments to their own post</a>. Based on the karma scores and what was said,<sup id="fnref:yes-requires-slapfight-highlights"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:yes-requires-slapfight-highlights">9</a></sup> I count it as a victory.</p>
<p>On 31 May 2019, a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for">draft of a new <em>Less Wrong</em> FAQ</a> included a link to <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"</a> as one of Scott Alexander's best essays. I argued that it would be better to cite almost literally any other <em>Slate Star Codex</em> post (most of which, I agreed, were exemplary). I claimed that the following disjunction was true: either Alexander's claim that "There's no rule of rationality saying that [one] shouldn't" "accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life" was a blatant lie, or I could call it a blatant lie because no rule of rationality says I shouldn't draw the category boundaries of "blatant lie" that way. Ruby Bloom, the new moderator who wrote the draft, <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/MqrzczdGhQCRePgqN/feedback-requested-draft-of-a-new-about-welcome-page-for/comment/oBDjhXgY5XtugvtLT">was persuaded</a>, and "... Not Man for the Categories" was not included in the final FAQ. Another "victory."</p>
<p>But "victories" weren't particularly comforting when I resented this becoming a political slapfight at all. I wrote to Anna and Steven Kaas (another old-timer who I was trying to "recruit" to my side of the civil war). In <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html">"What You Can't Say"</a>, Paul Graham had written, "The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work." But surely that depends on what your real work is. For someone like Paul Graham, whose goal was to make a lot of money writing software, "Don't say it" (except in this one meta-level essay) was probably the right choice. But someone whose goal is to improve Society's collective ability to reason should probably be doing more fighting than Paul Graham (although still preferably on the meta- rather than object-level), because political restrictions on speech and thought directly hurt the mission of "improve our collective ability to reason" in a way that they don't hurt the mission of "make a lot of money writing software."</p>
<p>I said I didn't know if either of them had caught the "Yes Requires the Possibility" trainwreck, but wasn't it terrifying that the person who objected to my innocuous philosophy comment was a <em>MIRI research associate</em>? Not to demonize that commenter, because <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#hair-trigger-antisexism">I was just as bad (if not worse) in 2008</a>. The difference was that in 2008, we had a culture that could beat it out of me.</p>
<p>Steven objected that tractability and side effects matter, not just effect on the mission considered in isolation. For example, the Earth's gravitational field directly impedes NASA's mission, and doesn't hurt Paul Graham, but both NASA and Paul Graham should spend the same amount of effort (<em>viz.</em>, zero) trying to reduce the Earth's gravity.</p>
<p>I agreed that tractability needed to be addressed, but the situation felt analogous to being in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species">a coal mine in which my favorite of our canaries had just died</a>. Caliphate officials (Eliezer, Scott, Anna) and loyalists (Steven) were patronizingly consoling me: sorry, I know you were really attached to that canary, but it's just a bird; it's not critical to the coal-mining mission. I agreed that I was unreasonably attached to that particular bird, but that's not why I expected <em>them</em> to care. The problem was what the dead canary was evidence of: if you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question <em>doesn't matter</em>. (The <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models">causal graph</a> is the fork "canary death ← mine gas → danger" rather than the direct link "canary death → danger".) Ben and Michael and Jessica claimed to have spotted their own dead canaries. I felt like the old-timer Rationality Elders should have been able to get on the same page about the canary-count issue?</p>
<p>Math and Wellness Month ended up being mostly a failure: the only math I ended up learning was <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/group-theory-for-wellness-i/">a fragment of group theory</a> and <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/">some probability theory</a> that <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#typical-point">later turned out to be deeply relevant to understanding sex differences</a>. So much for taking a break.</p>
<p>In June 2019, I made <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/tal-yarkoni-no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you">a linkpost on <em>Less Wrong</em></a> to Tal Yarkoni's <a href="https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/">"No, It's Not The Incentives—It's you"</a>, about how professional scientists should stop using career incentives as an excuse for doing poor science. It generated a lot of discussion.</p>
<p>In an email (Subject: "LessWrong.com is dead to me"), Jessica identified <em>Less Wrong</em> moderator <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/5nH5Qtax9ae8CQjZ9/no-it-s-not-the-incentives-it-s-you/comment/vPj9E9iqXjnNdyhob">Raymond Arnold's comments</a> as her last straw. Jessica wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>LessWrong.com is a place where, if the value of truth conflicts with the value of protecting elites' feelings and covering their asses, the second value will win.</p>
<p>Trying to get LessWrong.com to adopt high-integrity norms is going to fail, hard, without a <em>lot</em> of conflict. (Enforcing high-integrity norms is like violence; if it doesn't work, you're not doing enough of it). People who think being exposed as fraudulent (or having their friends exposed as fraudulent) is a terrible outcome, are going to actively resist high-integrity discussion norms.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Posting on <em>Less Wrong</em> made sense as harm-reduction, but the only way to get people to stick up for truth would be to convert them to a whole new worldview, which would require a lot of in-person discussions. She brought up the idea of starting a new forum to replace <em>Less Wrong</em>.</p>
<p>Ben said that trying to discuss with the <em>Less Wrong</em> mod team would be a good intermediate step, after we clarified to ourselves what was going on; it might be "good practice in the same way that the Eliezer initiative was good practice." The premise should be, "If this is within the Overton window for <em>Less Wrong</em> moderators, there's a serious confusion on the conditions required for discourse"—scapegoating individuals wasn't part of it. He was less optimistic about harm reduction; participating on the site was implicitly endorsing it by submitting to the rule of the karma and curation systems.</p>
<p>"Riley" expressed sadness about how the discussion on "The Incentives" demonstrated that the community they loved—including dear friends—was in a bad way. Michael (in a separate private discussion) had said he was glad to hear about the belief-update. "Riley" said that Michael saying that also made them sad, because it seemed discordant to be happy about sad news. Michael wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I['m] sorry it made you sad. From my perspective, the question is no[t] "can we still be friends with such people", but "how can we still be friends with such people" and I am pretty certain that understanding their perspective [is] an important part of the answer. If clarity seems like death to them and like life to us, and we don't know this, IMHO that's an unpromising basis for friendship.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>I got into a scuffle with Ruby Bloom on his post on <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality">"Causal Reality <em>vs</em>. Social Reality"</a>. I wrote <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/X8u8ozpvhwcK4GskA">what I thought was a substantive critique</a>, but Ruby <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/7b2pWiCL33cqhTabg">complained that</a> my tone was too combative, and asked for more charity and collaborative truth-seeking<sup id="fnref:collaborative-truth-seeking"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:collaborative-truth-seeking">10</a></sup> in any future comments.</p>
<p>(My previous interaction with Ruby had been my challenge to "... Not Man for the Categories" appearing on the <em>Less Wrong</em> FAQ. Maybe he couldn't let me "win" again so quickly?)</p>
<p>I emailed the posse about the thread, on the grounds that gauging the psychology of the mod team was relevant to our upcoming <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty">Voice <em>vs.</em> Exit</a> choices. Meanwhile on <em>Less Wrong</em>, Ruby kept doubling down:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[I]f the goal is everyone being less wrong, I think some means of communicating are going to be more effective than others. I, at least, am a social monkey. If I am bluntly told I am wrong (even if I agree, even in private—but especially in public), I will feel attacked (if only at the S1 level), threatened (socially), and become defensive. It makes it hard to update and it makes it easy to dislike the one who called me out. [...]</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>Even if you wish to express that someone is wrong, I think this is done more effectively if one simultaneously continues to implicitly express "I think there is still some prior that you are correct and I curious to hear your thoughts", or failing that "You are very clearly wrong here yet I still respect you as a thinker who is worth my time to discourse with." [...] There's an icky thing here I feel like for there to be productive and healthy discussion you have to act as though at least one of the above statements is true, even if it isn't.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>"Wow, he's really overtly arguing that people should lie to him to protect his feelings," Ben commented via email. I would later complain to Anna that Ruby's profile said he was one of two people to have volunteered for CfAR on three continents. If this was the level of performance we could expect from veteran CfAR participants, what was CfAR <em>for</em>?</p>
<p><a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/v3zh3KhKNTdMXWkJH">I replied to Ruby that</a> you could just directly respond to your interlocutor's arguments. Whether you respect them as a thinker is off-topic. "You said X, but this is wrong because of Y" isn't a personal attack! I thought it was ironic that this happened on a post that was explicitly about causal <em>vs.</em> social reality; it's possible that I wouldn't have been so rigid about this if it weren't for that prompt.</p>
<p>(On reviewing the present post prior to publication, Ruby writes that he regrets his behavior during this exchange.)</p>
<p>Jessica ended up writing a post, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bwkZD6uskCQBJDCeC/self-consciousness-wants-to-make-everything-about-itself">"Self-Consciousness Wants Everything to Be About Itself"</a>, arguing that tone arguments are mainly about people silencing discussion of actual problems in order to protect their feelings. She used as a central example a case study of a college official crying and saying that she "felt attacked" in response to complaints about her office being insufficiently supportive of a racial community.</p>
<p>Jessica was surprised by how well it worked, judging by <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/xqAnKW46FqzPLnGmH/causal-reality-vs-social-reality/comment/wfzxj4GGRtZGMG9ni">Ruby mentioning silencing in a subsequent comment to me</a> (plausibly influenced by Jessica's post) and by <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bwkZD6uskCQBJDCeC/self-consciousness-wants-to-make-everything-about-itself/comment/EW3Mom9qfoggfBicf">an exchange between Ray and Ruby that she thought was "surprisingly okay"</a>.</p>
<p>From this, Jessica derived the moral that when people are doing something that seems obviously terrible and in bad faith, it can help to publicly explain why the abstract thing is bad, without accusing anyone. This made sense because people didn't want to be held to standards that other people aren't being held to: a call-out directed at oneself personally could be selective enforcement, but a call-out of the abstract pattern invited changing one's behavior if the new equilibrium looked better.</p>
<p>Michael said that part of the reason this worked was because it represented a clear threat of scapegoating without actually scapegoating and without surrendering the option to do so later; it was significant that Jessica's choice of example positioned her on the side of the powerful social-justice coalition.</p>
<hr>
<p>On 4 July 2019, Scott Alexander published <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/">"Some Clarifications on Rationalist Blogging"</a>, disclaiming any authority as a "rationalist" leader. ("I don't want to claim this blog is doing any kind of special 'rationality' work beyond showing people interesting problems [...] Insofar as [<em>Slate Star Codex</em>] makes any pretensions to being 'rationalist', it's a rationalist picnic and not a rationalist monastery.") I assumed this was inspired by <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#alter-the-beacon">Ben's request back in March</a> that Scott "alter the beacon" so as to not confuse people about what the current-year community was. I appreciated it.</p>
<hr>
<p>Jessica published <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam">"The AI Timelines Scam"</a>, arguing that the recent prominence of "short" (<em>e.g.</em>, 2030) timelines to transformative AI was better explained by political factors than by technical arguments: just as in previous decades, people had incentives to bluff and exaggerate about the imminence of AGI in order to attract resources to their own project.</p>
<p>(Remember, this was 2019. After seeing what GPT-3, <a href="https://openai.com/research/dall-e">DALL-E</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02311">PaLM</a>, <em>&c.</em> could do during the "long May 2020", it now looks to me that the short-timelines people had better intuitions than Jessica gave them credit for.)</p>
<p>I still sympathized with the pushback from Caliphate supporters against using "scam"/"fraud"/"lie"/<em>&c.</em> language to include motivated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain">elephant-in-the-brain</a>-like distortions. I conceded that this was a boring semantic argument, but I feared that until we invented better linguistic technology, the boring semantic argument was going to continue sucking up discussion bandwidth with others.</p>
<p>"Am I being too tone-policey here?" I asked the posse. "Is it better if I explicitly disclaim, 'This is marketing advice; I'm not claiming to be making a substantive argument'?" (Subject: "Re: reception of 'The AI Timelines Scam' is better than expected!")</p>
<p>Ben replied, "What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you?" He argued that investigations of financial fraud focus on false promises about money, rather than the psychological minutiæ of the perp's motives.</p>
<p>I replied that the concept of <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea"><em>mens rea</em></a> did seem necessary for maintaining good incentives, at least in some contexts. The law needs to distinguish between accidentally hitting a pedestrian in one's car ("manslaughter") and premeditated killing ("first-degree murder"), because traffic accidents are significantly less disincentivizable than offing one's enemies. (Anyone who drives at all is taking on some nonzero risk of committing vehicular manslaughter.) The manslaughter example was simpler than misinformation-that-moves-resources,<sup id="fnref:manslaughter-disanalogy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:manslaughter-disanalogy">11</a></sup> and it might not be <em>easy</em> for the court to determine "intent", but I didn't see what would reverse the weak principle that intent sometimes matters.</p>
<p>Ben replied that what mattered in the determination of manslaughter <em>vs.</em> murder was whether there was long-horizon optimization power toward the outcome of someone's death, not what sentiments the killer rehearsed in their working memory.</p>
<p>On a phone call later, Michael made an analogy between EA and Catholicism. The Pope was fraudulent, because the legitimacy of the Pope's position (and his claims to power and resources) rested on the pretense that he had a direct relationship with God, which wasn't true, and the Pope had to know on some level that it wasn't true. (I agreed that this usage of "fraud" made sense to me.) In Michael's view, Ben's charges against GiveWell were similar: GiveWell's legitimacy rested on the pretense that they were making decisions based on numbers, and they <a href="https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/">had to know at some level</a> that they weren't doing that.</p>
<hr>
<p>Ruby wrote a document about ways in which one's speech could harm people, which was discussed in the comments of a draft <em>Less Wrong</em> post by some of our posse members and some of the <em>Less Wrong</em> mods.<sup id="fnref:hidden-draft"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:hidden-draft">12</a></sup></p>
<p>Ben wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What I see as under threat is the ability to say in a way that's actually heard, not only that opinion X is false, but that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction. Frequently, attempts to say this are construed <em>primarily</em> as moves to attack some person or institution, pushing them into the outgroup. Frequently, people suggest to me an "equivalent" wording with a softer tone, which in fact omits important substantive criticisms I mean to make, while claiming to understand what's at issue.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ray Arnold replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My core claim is: "right now, this isn't possible, without a) it being heard by many people as an attack, b) without people having to worry that other people will see it as an attack, even if they don't."</p>
<p>It seems like you see this something as <em>"there's a precious thing that might be destroyed"</em> and I see it as <em>"a precious thing does not exist and must be created, and the circumstances in which it can exist are fragile."</em> It might have existed in the very early days of LessWrong. But the landscape now is very different than it was then. With billions of dollars available and at stake, what worked then can't be the same thing as what works now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(!!)<sup id="fnref:what-works-now"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:what-works-now">13</a></sup></p>
<p>Jessica pointed this out as a step towards discussing the real problem (Subject: "progress towards discussing the real thing??"). She elaborated in the secret thread: now that the "EA" scene was adjacent to real-world money and power, people were incentivized to protect their reputations (and beliefs related to their reputations) in anti-epistemic ways, in a way that they wouldn't if the scene were still just a philosophy club. This was catalyzing a shift of norms from "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" towards protecting feelings—where "protecting feelings" was actually about protecting power. The fact that the scene was allocating billions of dollars made it <em>more</em> important for public discussions to reach the truth, compared to philosophy club—but it also increased the likelihood of obfuscatory behavior that philosophy-club norms (like "assume good faith") didn't account for. We might need to extend philosophy-club norms to take into account the possibility of adversarial action: there's a reason that courts of law don't assume good faith. We didn't want to disproportionately punish people for getting caught up in obfuscatory patterns; that would just increase the incentive to obfuscate. But we did need some way to reveal what was going on.</p>
<p>In email, Jessica acknowledged that Ray had a point that it was confusing to use court-inspired language if we didn't intend to blame and punish people. Michael said that court language was our way to communicate "You don't have the option of non-engagement with the complaints that are being made." (Courts can <em>summon</em> people; you can't ignore a court summons the way you can ignore ordinary critics.)</p>
<p>Michael said that we should also develop skill in using social-justicey blame language, as was used against us, harder, while we still thought of ourselves as <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/">trying to correct people's mistakes rather than being in a conflict</a> against the Blight. "Riley" said that this was a terrifying you-have-become-the-abyss suggestion; Ben thought it was obviously a good idea.</p>
<p>I was horrified by the extent to which <em>Less Wrong</em> moderators (!) seemed to be explicitly defending "protect feelings" norms. Previously, I had mostly been seeing the present struggle through the lens of my idiosyncratic <a href="/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/">Something to Protect</a> as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness. I was happy to have Michael, Ben, and Jessica as allies, but I hadn't been seeing the Blight as a unified problem. Now I was seeing <em>something</em>.</p>
<p>An in-person meeting was arranged for 23 July 2019 at the <em>Less Wrong</em> office, with Ben, Jessica, me, and most of the <em>Less Wrong</em> team (Ray, Ruby, Oliver Habryka, Vaniver, Jim Babcock). I don't have notes and don't really remember what was discussed in enough detail to faithfully recount it.<sup id="fnref:memory"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:memory">14</a></sup> I ended up crying at one point and left the room for a while.</p>
<p>The next day, I asked Ben and Jessica for their takeaways via email (Subject: "peace talks outcome?"). Jessica said that I was a "helpful emotionally expressive and articulate victim" and that there seemed to be a consensus that people like me should be warned somehow that <em>Less Wrong</em> wasn't doing fully general sanity-maximization anymore. (Because community leaders were willing to sacrifice, for example, ability to discuss non-AI heresies in order to focus on sanity about AI in particular while maintaining enough mainstream acceptability and power.)</p>
<p>I said that for me and my selfish perspective, the main outcome was finally shattering my "rationalist" social identity. I needed to exhaust all possible avenues of appeal before it became real to me. The morning after was the first for which "rationalists ... them" felt more natural than "rationalists ... us".</p>
<h3 id="a-beleaguered-ally-under-fire-julyaugust-2019">A Beleaguered Ally Under Fire (July–August 2019)</h3>
<p>Michael's reputation in the community, already not what it once was, continued to be debased even further.</p>
<p>The local community center, the Berkeley REACH,<sup id="fnref:reach-acronym-expansion"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:reach-acronym-expansion">15</a></sup> was conducting an investigation as to whether to exclude Michael (which was mostly moot, as he didn't live in the Bay Area). When I heard that the committee conducting the investigation was "very close to releasing a statement", I wrote to them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I've been collaborating with Michael a lot recently, and I'm happy to contribute whatever information I can to make the report more accurate. What are the charges?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>They replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To be clear, we are not a court of law addressing specific "charges." We're a subcommittee of the Berkeley REACH Panel tasked with making decisions that help keep the space and the community safe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Allow me to rephrase my question about charges. What are the reasons that the safety of the space and the community require you to write a report about Michael? To be clear, a community that excludes Michael on inadequate evidence is one where <em>I</em> feel unsafe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We arranged a call, during which I angrily testified that Michael was no threat to the safety of the space and the community. This would have been a bad idea if it were the cops, but in this context, I figured my political advocacy couldn't hurt.</p>
<p>Concurrently, I got into an argument with Kelsey Piper about Michael after she wrote on Discord that her "impression of <em>Vassar</em>'s threatening schism is that it's fundamentally about Vassar threatening to stir shit up until people stop socially excluding him for his bad behavior." I didn't think that was what the schism was about (Subject: "Michael Vassar and the theory of optimal gossip").</p>
<p>In the course of litigating Michael's motivations (the details of which are not interesting enough to summarize here), Kelsey mentioned that she thought Michael had done immense harm to me—that my models of the world and ability to reason were worse than they were a year ago. I thanked her for the concern, and asked if she could be more specific.</p>
<p>She said she was referring to my ability to predict consensus and what other people believe. I expected people to be convinced by arguments that they found not only unconvincing, but so unconvincing they didn't see why I would bother. I believed things to be in obvious violation of widespread agreement that everyone else thought were not. My shocked indignation at other people's behavior indicated a poor model of social reality.</p>
<p>I considered this an insightful observation about a way in which I'm socially retarded. I had had <a href="/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/">similar</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/">problems</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/">with</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/strategy-overhaul/">school</a>. We're told that the purpose of school is education (to the extent that most people think of <em>school</em> and <em>education</em> as synonyms), but the consensus behavior is "sit in lectures and trade assignments for grades." Faced with what I saw as a contradiction between the consensus narrative and the consensus behavior, I would assume that the narrative was the "correct" version, and so I spent a lot of time trying to start conversations about math with everyone and then getting indignant when they'd say, "What class is this for?" Math isn't for classes; it's the other way around, right?</p>
<p>Empirically, no! But I had to resolve the contradiction between narrative and reality somehow, and if my choices were "People are <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/">mistakenly</a> failing to live up to the narrative" and "<a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">Everybody knows</a> the narrative is a lie; it would be crazy to expect people to live up to it", the former had been more appealing.</p>
<p>It was the same thing here. Kelsey said that it was predictable that Yudkowsky wouldn't make a public statement, even one as basic as "category boundaries should be drawn for epistemic and not instrumental reasons," because his experience of public statements was that they'd be taken out of context and used against MIRI by the likes of /r/SneerClub. This wasn't an update at all. (Everyone at "Arcadia" had agreed, in the house discussion in April.) Vassar's insistence that Eliezer be expected to do something that he obviously was never going to do had caused me to be confused and surprised by reality.<sup id="fnref:statement"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:statement">16</a></sup></p>
<p>Kelsey seemed to be taking it as obvious that Eliezer Yudkowsky's public behavior was optimized to respond to the possibility of political attacks from people who hate him anyway, and not the actuality of thousands of words of careful arguments appealing to his own writings from ten years ago. Very well. Maybe it <em>was</em> obvious. But if so, <em>I had no reason to care what Eliezer Yudkowsky said</em>, because not provoking SneerClub isn't truth-tracking, and careful arguments are. This was a huge surprise to me, even if Kelsey knew better.</p>
<p>What Kelsey saw as "Zack is losing his ability to model other people and I'm worried about him," I thought Ben and Jessica would see as "Zack is angry about living in <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/">simulacrum level 3</a> and we're worried about <em>everyone else</em>."</p>
<p>I did think that Kelsey was mistaken about how much causality to attribute to Michael's influence, rather than to me already being socially retarded. From my perspective, validation from Michael was merely the catalyst that excited me from confused-and-sad to confused-and-socially-aggressive-about-it. The latter phase revealed a lot of information, and not just to me. Now I was ready to be less confused—after I was done grieving.</p>
<p>Later, talking in person at "Arcadia", Kelsey told me that the REACH was delaying its release of its report about Michael because someone whose identity she could not disclose had threatened to sue. As far as my interest in defending Michael went, I counted this as short-term good news (because the report wasn't being published for now) but longer-term bad news (because the report must be a hit piece if Michael's mysterious ally was trying to hush it).</p>
<p>When I mentioned this to Michael on Signal on 3 August 2019, he replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The person is me, the whole process is a hit piece, literally, the investigation process and not the content. Happy to share the latter with you. You can talk with Ben about appropriate ethical standards.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In retrospect, I feel dumb for not guessing that Michael's mysterious ally was Michael himself. This kind of situation is an example of <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#privacy-constraints">how norms protecting confidentiality</a> distort information; Kelsey felt obligated to obfuscate any names connected to potential litigation, which led me to the infer the existence of a nonexistent person. I can't say I never introduce this kind of distortion myself (for I, too, am bound by norms), but when I do, I feel dirty about it.</p>
<p>As far as appropriate ethical standards go, I didn't approve of silencing critics with lawsuit threats, even while I agreed with Michael that "the process is the punishment." I imagine that if the REACH wanted to publish a report about me, I would expect to defend myself in public, having faith that the <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/">beautiful weapon</a> of my Speech would carry the day against a corrupt community center—or for that matter, against /r/SneerClub. </p>
<p>This is arguably one of my more religious traits. Michael and Kelsey are domain experts and probably know better.</p>
<h3 id="an-poignant-to-me-anecdote-that-fits-here-chronologically-but-doesnt-particularly-foreshadow-anything-august-2019">An Poignant-to-Me Anecdote That Fits Here Chronologically But Doesn't Particularly Foreshadow Anything (August 2019)</h3>
<p>While visiting "Arcadia", "Meredith" and Mike's son (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?"</p>
<p>After a long pause, I said, "Yes," as if I had misheard the question as "Are you a boy?" I think it was a motivated mishearing: it was only after I answered that I consciously realized that's not what the kid asked.</p>
<p>I think I would have preferred to say, "Because I have a penis, like you." But it didn't seem appropriate.</p>
<h3 id="philosophy-blogging-interlude-augustoctober-2019">Philosophy Blogging Interlude! (August–October 2019)</h3>
<p>I wanted to finish the memoir-post mourning the "rationalists", but I still felt psychologically constrained. So instead, I mostly turned to a combination of writing <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qaYeQnSYotCHQcPh8/drowning-children-are-rare/comment/Nhv9KPte7d5jbtLBv">bitter</a> and <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tkuknrjYCbaDoZEh5/could-we-solve-this-email-mess-if-we-all-moved-to-paid/comment/ZkreTspP599RBKsi7">insulting</a> <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE">comments</a> whenever I saw someone praise the "rationalists" collectively, and—more philosophy blogging!</p>
<p>In August 2019's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests">"Schelling Categories, and Simple Membership Tests"</a>, I explained a nuance that had only merited a passing mention in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"</a>: sometimes you might want categories for different agents to <em>coordinate</em> on, even at the cost of some statistical "fit." (This was generalized from a "pro-trans" argument that had occurred to me, <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">that self-identity is an easy Schelling point when different people disagree about what "gender" they perceive someone as</a>.)</p>
<p>In September 2019's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">"Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists"</a>, I presented a toy mathematical model of how censorship distorts group beliefs. I was surprised by how well-received it was (high karma, Curated within a few days, later included in the Best-of-2019 collection), especially given that it was explicitly about politics (albeit at a meta level, of course). Ben and Jessica had discouraged me from bothering when I sent them a draft. (Jessica said that it was obvious even to ten-year-olds that partisan politics distorts impressions by filtering evidence. "[D]o you think we could get a ten-year-old to explain it to Eliezer Yudkowsky?" I asked.)</p>
<p>In October 2019's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception">"Algorithms of Deception!"</a>, I exhibited some toy Python code modeling different kinds of deception. If a function faithfully passes its observations as input to another function, the second function can construct a well-calibrated probability distribution. But if the first function outright fabricates evidence, or selectively omits some evidence, or gerrymanders the categories by which it interprets its observations as evidence, the second function computes a worse probability distribution.</p>
<p>Also in October 2019, in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist">"Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist"</a>, I replied to Scott Alexander's <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/">"Against Lie Inflation"</a>, which was itself a generalized rebuke of Jessica's "The AI Timelines Scam". Scott thought Jessica was wrong to use language like "lie", "scam", <em>&c.</em> to describe someone being (purportedly) motivatedly wrong, but not necessarily consciously lying.</p>
<p>I was <em>furious</em> when "Against Lie Inflation" came out. (Furious at what I perceived as hypocrisy, not because I particularly cared about defending Jessica's usage.) Oh, so <em>now</em> Scott agreed that making language less useful is a problem?! But on further consideration, I realized he was actually being consistent in admitting appeals to consequences as legitimate. In objecting to the expanded definition of "lying", Alexander was counting "everyone is angrier" (because of more frequent accusations of lying) as a cost. In my philosophy, that wasn't a legitimate cost. (If everyone <em>is</em> lying, maybe people <em>should</em> be angry!)</p>
<h3 id="the-caliphs-madness-august-and-november-2019">The Caliph's Madness (August and November 2019)</h3>
<p>I continued to note signs of contemporary Yudkowsky not being the same author who wrote the Sequences. In August 2019, <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164241431629721600">he Tweeted</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am actively hostile to neoreaction and the alt-right, routinely block such people from commenting on my Twitter feed, and make it clear that I do not welcome support from those quarters. Anyone insinuating otherwise is uninformed, or deceptive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259164819845120">I argued that</a> the people who smear him as a right-wing Bad Guy do so in order to extract these kinds of statements of political alignment as concessions; his own timeless decision theory would seem to recommend ignoring them rather than paying even this small <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">Danegeld</a>.</p>
<p>When I emailed the posse about it begging for Likes (Subject: "can't leave well enough alone"), Jessica said she didn't get my point. If people are falsely accusing you of something (in this case, of being a right-wing Bad Guy), isn't it helpful to point out that the accusation is false? It seemed like I was advocating for self-censorship on the grounds that speaking up helps the false accusers. But it also helps bystanders (by correcting the misapprehension) and hurts the false accusers (by demonstrating to bystanders that the accusers are making things up). By <a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164259289575251968">linking to</a> <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/">"Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"</a> in my replies, I seemed to be insinuating that Yudkowsky was under some sort of duress, but this wasn't spelled out: if Yudkowsky would face social punishment for advancing right-wing opinions, did that mean he was under such duress that saying anything at all would be helping the oppressors?</p>
<p>The paragraph from "Kolmogorov Complicity" that I was thinking of was (bolding mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, "If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?" <strong>Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won't be very convincing.</strong> Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I perceived a pattern where people who are in trouble with the orthodoxy buy their own safety by denouncing other heretics: not just disagreeing with the other heretics because they are mistaken, which would be right and proper Discourse, but denouncing them ("actively hostile to") as a way of paying Danegeld.</p>
<p>Suppose there are five true heresies, but anyone who's on the record as believing more than one gets burned as a witch. Then it's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">impossible to have a unified rationalist community</a>, because people who want to talk about one heresy can't let themselves be seen in the company of people who believe another. That's why Scott Alexander couldn't get the philosophy of categorization right in full generality, even though his writings revealed an implicit understanding of the correct way,<sup id="fnref:implicit-understanding"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:implicit-understanding">17</a></sup> and he and I had a common enemy in the social-justice egregore. He couldn't afford to. He'd already spent his Overton budget <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/">on anti-feminism</a>.</p>
<p>Alexander (and Yudkowsky and Anna and the rest of the Caliphate) seemed to accept this as an inevitable background fact of existence, like the weather. But I saw a Schelling point off in the distance where us witches stick together for Free Speech,<sup id="fnref:kolmogorov-common-interests-contrast"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:kolmogorov-common-interests-contrast">18</a></sup> and it was tempting to try to jump there. (It would probably be better if there were a way to organize just the good witches, and exclude all the Actually Bad witches, but the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/">Sorites problem</a> on witch Badness made that hard to organize without falling back to the one-heresy-per-thinker equilibrium.)</p>
<p>Jessica thought my use of "heresy" was conflating factual beliefs with political movements. (There are no intrinsically "right wing" <em>facts</em>.) I agreed that conflating political positions with facts would be bad. I wasn't interested in defending the "alt-right" (whatever that means) broadly. But I had learned stuff from reading far-right authors <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#unqualified-reservations">(most notably Mencius Moldbug)</a> and from talking with "Thomas". I was starting to appreciate <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#less-precise-is-more-violent">what Michael had said about "Less precise is more violent" back in April</a> when I was talking about criticizing "rationalists".</p>
<p>Jessica asked if my opinion would change depending on whether Yudkowsky thought neoreaction was intellectually worth engaging with. (Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/6qPextf9KyWLFJ53j/why-is-mencius-moldbug-so-popular-on-less-wrong-answer-he-s/comment/TcLhiMk8BTp4vN3Zs">had said years ago</a> that Moldbug was low quality.)</p>
<p>I would never fault anyone for saying "I vehemently disagree with what little I've read and/or heard of this author." I wasn't accusing Yudkowsky of being insincere.</p>
<p>What I did think was that the need to keep up appearances of not being a right wing Bad Guy was a serious distortion of people's beliefs, because there are at least a few questions of fact where believing the correct answer can, in the political environment of the current year, be used to paint one as a right-wing Bad Guy. I would have hoped for Yudkowsky to <a href="/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/">notice that this is a rationality problem</a> and to not actively make the problem worse. I was counting "I do not welcome support from those quarters" as making the problem worse insofar as it would seem to imply that if I thought I'd learned valuable things from Moldbug, that made me less welcome in Yudkowsky's fiefdom.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky certainly wouldn't endorse "Even learning things from these people makes you unwelcome" <em>as stated</em>, but "I do not welcome support from those quarters" still seemed like a pointlessly partisan silencing/shunning attempt, when one could just as easily say, "I'm not a neoreactionary, and if some people who read me are, that's <em>obviously not my fault</em>."</p>
<p>Jessica asked if Yudkowsky denouncing neoreaction and the alt-right would still seem harmful, if he were to also to acknowledge, <em>e.g.</em>, racial IQ differences?</p>
<p><a id="tragedy-of-recursive-silencing"></a>I agreed that that would be better, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke that hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, either you become an <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence">evidence-filtering clever arguer</a>, or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)</p>
<p>It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and my incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had Something to Protect in the forbidden zone and I was a decent programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as <a href="https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849">James Damore eventually found another job</a>). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves pushed toward the "Say Nothing" attractor.</p>
<p>It was instructive to compare Yudkowsky's new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013, in response to a <em>TechCrunch</em> article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog <em>More Right</em>:<sup id="fnref:linkrot"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:linkrot">19</a></sup></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"More Right" is not any kind of acknowledged offspring of Less Wrong nor is it so much as linked to by the Less Wrong site. We are not part of a neoreactionary conspiracy. We are and have been explicitly pro-Enlightenment, as such, under that name. Should it be the case that any neoreactionary is citing me as a supporter of their ideas, I was never asked and never gave my consent. [...]</p>
<p>Also to be clear: I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand due to fear of public unpopularity. However I found Scott Alexander's takedown of neoreaction convincing and thus I shrugged and didn't bother to investigate further.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My criticism regarding negotiating with terrorists did not apply to the 2013 disavowal. <em>More Right</em> was brand encroachment on Anissimov's part that Yudkowsky had a legitimate interest in policing, and the "I try not to dismiss ideas out of hand" disclaimer importantly avoided legitimizing <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/09/technology-communism-and-brown-scare/">McCarthyist persecution</a>.</p>
<p>The question was, what had specifically happened in the last six years to shift Yudkowsky's opinion on neoreaction from (paraphrased) "Scott says it's wrong, so I stopped reading" to (verbatim) "actively hostile"? Note especially the inversion from (both paraphrased) "I don't support neoreaction" (fine, of course) to "I don't even want <em>them</em> supporting <em>me</em>" (<a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1164329446314135552">which was bizarre</a>; humans with very different views on politics nevertheless have a common interest in not being transformed into paperclips).</p>
<p>Did Yudkowsky get new information about neoreaction's hidden Badness parameter sometime between 2013 and 2019, or did moral coercion from the left intensify (because Trump and <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/">because Berkeley</a>)? My bet was on the latter.</p>
<hr>
<p>However it happened, it didn't seem like the brain damage was limited to "political" topics, either. In November 2019, we saw another example of Yudkowsky destroying language for the sake of politeness, this time the context of him <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/">trying to wirehead his fiction subreddit by suppressing criticism-in-general</a>.</p>
<p>That's my characterization, of course: the post itself talks about "reducing negativity". <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/">In a followup comment, Yudkowsky wrote</a> (bolding mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On discussion threads for a work's particular chapter, people may debate the well-executedness of some particular feature of that work's particular chapter. Comments saying that nobody should enjoy this whole work are still verboten. <strong>Replies here should still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>But ... "I thought X seemed Y to me"<sup id="fnref:pleonasm"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:pleonasm">20</a></sup> and "X is Y" do not mean the same thing! <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory">The map is not the territory</a>. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent">The quotation is not the referent</a>. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try">The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from the algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing</a>. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski">If my character is actually quite stupid, I want to believe that my character is actually quite stupid.</a></p>
<p>It might seem like a little thing of no significance—requiring <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-message">"I" statements</a> is commonplace in therapy groups and corporate sensitivity training—but this little thing coming from Eliezer Yudkowsky setting guidelines for an explicitly "rationalist" space made a pattern <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click">click</a>. If everyone is forced to only make claims about their map ("<em>I</em> think", "<em>I</em> feel") and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question and thereby threaten them, because <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/disagreement-ishtml">disagreement is disrespect</a>), that's great for reducing social conflict but not for the kind of collective information processing that accomplishes cognitive work,<sup id="fnref:i-statements"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:i-statements">21</a></sup> like good literary criticism. A rationalist space needs to be able to talk about the territory.</p>
<p>To be fair, the same comment I quoted also lists "Being able to consider and optimize literary qualities" as one of the major considerations to be balanced. But I think (<em>I</em> think) it's also fair to note that (as we had seen on <em>Less Wrong</em> earlier that year), lip service is cheap. It's easy to say, "Of course I don't think politeness is more important than truth," while systematically behaving as if you did.</p>
<p>"Broadcast criticism is adversely selected for critic errors," Yudkowsky wrote in the post on reducing negativity, correctly pointing out that if a work's true level of mistakenness is <em>M</em>, the <em>i</em>-th commenter's estimate of mistakenness has an error term of <em>E<sub>i</sub></em>, and commenters leave a negative comment when their estimate <em>M</em> + <em>E<sub>i</sub></em> is greater than their threshold for commenting <em>T<sub>i</sub></em>, then the comments that get posted will have been selected for erroneous criticism (high <em>E<sub>i</sub></em>) and commenter chattiness (low <em>T<sub>i</sub></em>).</p>
<p>I can imagine some young person who liked <a href="https://hpmor.com/"><em>Harry Potter and the Methods</em></a> being intimidated by the math notation and indiscriminately accepting this wisdom from the great Eliezer Yudkowsky as a reason to be less critical, specifically. But a somewhat less young person who isn't intimidated by math should notice that this is just <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean">regression to the mean</a>. The same argument applies to praise!</p>
<p>What I would hope for from a rationality teacher and a rationality community, would be efforts to instill the general skill of modeling things like regression to the mean and selection effects, as part of the general project of having a discourse that does collective information-processing.</p>
<p>And from the way Yudkowsky writes these days, it looks like he's ... not interested in collective information-processing? Or that he doesn't actually believe that's a real thing? "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private," he writes! I agree that the positive purpose of public criticism isn't solely to help the author. (If it were, there would be no reason for anyone but the author to read it.) But readers <em>do</em> benefit from insightful critical commentary. (If they didn't, why would they read the comments section?) When I read a story and am interested in reading the comments <em>about</em> a story, it's because I'm interested in the thoughts of other readers, who might have picked up subtleties I missed. I don't want other people to self-censor comments on any plot holes or <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic">Fridge Logic</a> they noticed for fear of dampening someone else's enjoyment or hurting the author's feelings.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky claims that criticism should be given in private because then the target "may find it much more credible that you meant only to help them, and weren't trying to gain status by pushing them down in public." I'll buy this as a reason why credibly <em>altruistic</em> unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private.<sup id="fnref:altruistic-criticism"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:altruistic-criticism">22</a></sup> Indeed, meaning <em>only</em> to help the target just doesn't seem like a plausible critic motivation in most cases. But the fact that critics typically have non-altruistic motives, doesn't mean criticism isn't helpful. In order to incentivize good criticism, you <em>want</em> people to be rewarded with status for making good criticisms. You'd have to be some sort of communist to disagree with this!<sup id="fnref:communism-analogy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:communism-analogy">23</a></sup></p>
<p>There's a striking contrast between the Yudkowsky of 2019 who wrote the "Reducing Negativity" post, and an earlier Yudkowsky (from even before the Sequences) who maintained <a href="http://sl4.org/crocker.html">a page on Crocker's rules</a>: if you declare that you operate under Crocker's rules, you're consenting to other people optimizing their speech for conveying information rather than being nice to you. If someone calls you an idiot, that's not an "insult"; they're just informing you about the fact that you're an idiot, and you should probably thank them for the tip. (If you <em>were</em> an idiot, wouldn't you be better off knowing that?)</p>
<p>It's of course important to stress that Crocker's rules are opt-in on the part of the receiver; it's not a license to unilaterally be rude to other people. Adopting Crocker's rules as a community-level norm on an open web forum does not seem like it would end well.</p>
<p>Still, there's something precious about a culture where people appreciate the obvious normative ideal underlying Crocker's rules, even if social animals can't reliably live up to the normative ideal. Speech is for conveying information. People can say things—even things about me or my work—not as a command, or as a reward or punishment, but just to establish a correspondence between words and the world: a map that reflects a territory.</p>
<p>Appreciation of this obvious normative ideal seems strikingly absent from Yudkowsky's modern work—as if he's given up on the idea that reasoning in public is useful or possible. His <a href="/images/yudkowsky_commenting_guidelines.png"><em>Less Wrong</em> commenting guidelines</a> declare, "If it looks like it would be unhedonic to spend time interacting with you, I will ban you from commenting on my posts." The idea that people who are unhedonic to interact with might have intellectually substantive criticisms that the author has a <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pC74aJyCRgns6atzu/meta-discussion-from-circling-as-cousin-to-rationality/comment/kS4BfYJuZ8ZcwuwfB">duty to address</a> does not seem to have crossed his mind.</p>
<p>The "Reducing Negativity" post also warns against the failure mode of attempted "author telepathy": attributing bad motives to authors and treating those attributions as fact without accounting for uncertainty or distinguishing observations from inferences. I should be explicit, then: when I say negative things about Yudkowsky's state of mind, like it's "as if he's given up on the idea that reasoning in public is useful or possible", that's a probabilistic inference, not a certain observation.</p>
<p>But I think making probabilistic inferences is ... fine? The sentence "Credibly helpful unsolicited criticism should be delivered in private" sure does look to me like text generated by a state of mind that doesn't believe that reasoning in public is useful or possible. I think that someone who did believe in public reason would have noticed that criticism has information content whose public benefits might outweigh its potential to harm an author's reputation or feelings. If you think I'm getting this inference wrong, feel free to let me <em>and other readers</em> know why in the comments.</p>
<h3 id="a-worthy-critic-at-last-november-2019">A Worthy Critic At Last (November 2019)</h3>
<p>I received an interesting email comment on my philosophy-of-categorization thesis from MIRI researcher Abram Demski. Abram asked: ideally, shouldn't all conceptual boundaries be drawn with appeal-to-consequences? Wasn't the problem just with bad (motivated, shortsighted) appeals to consequences? Agents categorize in order to make decisions. The best classifier for an application depends on the costs and benefits. As a classic example, prey animals need to avoid predators, so it makes sense for their predator-detection classifiers to be configured such that they jump away from every rustling in the bushes, even if it's usually not a predator.</p>
<p>I had thought of the "false positives are better than false negatives when detecting predators" example as being about the limitations of evolution as an AI designer: messy evolved animal brains don't track probability and utility separately the way a cleanly-designed AI could. As I had explained in "... Boundaries?", it made sense for consequences to motivate what variables you paid attention to. But given the subspace that's relevant to your interests, you want to run an "epistemically legitimate" clustering algorithm on the data you see there, which depends on the data, not your values. Ideal probabilistic beliefs shouldn't depend on consequences.</p>
<p>Abram didn't think the issue was so clear-cut. Where do "probabilities" come from, in the first place? The reason we expect something like Bayesianism to be an attractor among self-improving agents is because probabilistic reasoning is broadly useful: epistemology can be derived from instrumental concerns. He agreed that severe wireheading issues potentially arise if you allow consequentialist concerns to affect your epistemics.</p>
<p>But the alternative view had its own problems. If your AI consists of a consequentialist module that optimizes for utility in the world, and an epistemic module that optimizes for the accuracy of its beliefs, that's <em>two</em> agents, not one: how could that be reflectively coherent? You could, perhaps, bite the bullet here, for fear that consequentialism doesn't propagate itself and that wireheading was inevitable. On this view, Abram explained, "Agency is an illusion which can only be maintained by crippling agents and giving them a split-brain architecture where an instrumental task-monkey does all the important stuff while an epistemic overseer supervises." Whether this view was ultimately tenable or not, this did show that trying to forbid appeals-to-consequences entirely led to strange places.</p>
<p>I didn't immediately have an answer for Abram, but I was grateful for the engagement. (Abram was clearly addressing the real philosophical issues, and not just trying to mess with me in the way that almost everyone else in Berkeley was trying to mess with me.)</p>
<h3 id="writers-block-november-2019">Writer's Block (November 2019)</h3>
<p>I wrote to Ben about how I was still stuck on writing the grief-memoir. My plan had been to tell the story of the Category War while <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response">Glomarizing</a> about the content of private conversations, then offer Scott and Eliezer pre-publication right of reply (because it's only fair to give your former-hero-current-<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenemy">frenemies</a> warning when you're about to publicly call them intellectually dishonest), then share it to <em>Less Wrong</em> and the <a href="https://www.themotte.org/">/r/TheMotte</a> culture war thread, and then I would have the emotional closure to move on with my life (learn math, go to gym, chop wood, carry water).</p>
<p>The reason it <em>should</em> have been safe to write was because it's good to explain things. It should be possible to say, "This is not a social attack; I'm not saying 'rationalists Bad, Yudkowsky Bad'; I'm just trying to tell the true story about why I've been upset this year, including addressing counterarguments for why some would argue that I shouldn't be upset, why other people could be said to be behaving 'reasonably' given their incentives, why I nevertheless wish they'd be braver and adhere to principle rather than 'reasonably' following incentives, <em>&c</em>."</p>
<p>So why couldn't I write? Was it that I didn't know how to make "This is not a social attack" credible? Maybe because ... it wasn't true?? I was afraid that telling a story about our leader being intellectually dishonest was the nuclear option. If you're slowly but surely gaining territory in a conventional war, suddenly escalating to nukes would be pointlessly destructive. This metaphor was horribly non-normative (<a href="https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends.html">arguing is not a punishment</a>; carefully telling a true story <em>about</em> an argument is not a nuke), but I didn't know how to make it stably go away.</p>
<p>A more motivationally-stable compromise would be to split off whatever generalizable insights that would have been part of the story into their own posts. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">"Heads I Win, Tails?—Never Heard of Her"</a> had been a huge success as far as I was concerned, and I could do more of that kind of thing, analyzing the social stuff without making it personal, even if, secretly ("secretly"), it was personal.</p>
<p>Ben replied that it didn't seem like it was clear to me that I was a victim of systemic abuse, and that I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers. He thought if I could internalize that, I would be able to forgive myself a lot of messiness, which would make the problem less daunting.</p>
<p>I said I would bite that bullet: Yes, I was trying to figure out whether I was being fair to my abusers, and it was an important question to get right! "Other people's lack of standards harmed me, therefore I don't need to hold myself to standards in my response because I have <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYrcTJFJoYKX2DxNL/extenuating-circumstances">extenuating circumstances</a>" would be a lame excuse.</p>
<p>This seemed correlated with the recurring stalemated disagreement within our posse, where Michael/Ben/Jessica would say, "Fraud, if the word ever meant anything", and while I agreed that they were pointing to an important pattern of false representations optimized to move resources, I was still sympathetic to the Caliphate-defender's perspective that this usage of "fraud" was <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/">motte-and-baileying</a> between different senses of the word. (Most people would say that the things we were alleging MIRI and CfAR had done wrong were qualitatively different from the things Enron and Bernie Madoff had done wrong.<sup id="fnref:ftx"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ftx">24</a></sup>) I wanted to do more work to formulate a more precise theory of the psychology of deception to describe exactly how things were messed up a way that wouldn't be susceptible to the motte-and-bailey charge.</p>
<h3 id="interactions-with-a-different-rationalist-splinter-group-novemberdecember-2019">Interactions With a Different Rationalist Splinter Group (November–December 2019)</h3>
<p>On 12 and 13 November 2019, Ziz <a href="https://archive.ph/GQOeg">published</a> <a href="https://archive.ph/6HsvS">several</a> <a href="https://archive.ph/jChxP">blog</a> <a href="https://archive.ph/TPei9">posts</a> laying out her grievances against MIRI and CfAR. On the fifteenth, Ziz and three collaborators staged a protest at the CfAR reunion being held at a retreat center in the North Bay near Camp Meeker. A call to the police falsely alleged that the protesters had a gun, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20230316210946/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/deputies-working-to-identify-suspects-in-camp-meeker-incident/">resulting in a</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20201112041007/https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/authorities-id-four-arrested-in-westminster-woods-protest/">dramatic police reaction</a> (SWAT team called, highway closure, children's group a mile away being evacuated—the works).</p>
<p>I was tempted to email links to Ziz's blog posts to the Santa Rosa <em>Press-Democrat</em> reporter covering the incident (as part of my information-sharing-is-good virtue ethics), but decided to refrain because I predicted that Anna would prefer I didn't.</p>
<p>The main relevance of this incident to my Whole Dumb Story is that Ziz's memoir–manifesto posts included <a href="https://archive.ph/jChxP#selection-1325.0-1325.4">a 5500 word section about me</a>. Ziz portrays me as a slave to social reality, throwing trans women under the bus to appease the forces of cissexism. I don't think that's what's going on with me, but I can see why the theory was appealing.</p>
<hr>
<p>On 12 December 2019 I had an interesting exchange with <a href="https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/">Somni</a>, one of the "Meeker Four"—presumably out on bail at this time?—on Discord.</p>
<p>I told her it was surprising that she spent so much time complaining about CfAR, Anna Salamon, Kelsey Piper, <em>&c.</em>, but <em>I</em> seemed to get along fine with her—because naïvely, one would think that my views were so much worse. Was I getting a pity pass because she thought false consciousness was causing me to act against my own transfem class interests? Or what?</p>
<p>In order to be absolutely clear about my terrible views, I said that I was privately modeling a lot of transmisogyny complaints as something like—a certain neurotype-cluster of non-dominant male is latching onto locally ascendant social-justice ideology in which claims to victimhood can be leveraged into claims to power. Traditionally, men are moral agents, but not patients; women are moral patients, but not agents. If weird non-dominant men aren't respected if identified as such (because low-ranking males aren't valuable allies, and don't have the intrinsic moral patiency of women), but <em>can</em> get victimhood/moral-patiency points for identifying as oppressed transfems, that creates an incentive gradient for them to do so. No one was allowed to notice this except me, because everybody <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">who's anybody</a> prefers to stay on the good side of social-justice ideology unless they have Something to Protect that requires defying it.</p>
<p>Somni said we got along because I was being victimized by the same forces of gaslighting as her and wasn't lying about my agenda. Maybe she <em>should</em> be complaining about me?—but I seemed to be following a somewhat earnest epistemic process, whereas Kelsey, Scott, and Anna were not. If I were to start going, "Here's my rationality org; rule #1: no transfems (except me); rule #2, no telling people about rule #1", then she would talk about it.</p>
<p>I would later remark to Anna that Somni and Ziz saw themselves as being oppressed by people's hypocritical and manipulative social perceptions and behavior. Merely using the appropriate language ("Somni ... she", <em>&c.</em>) protected her against threats from the Political Correctness police, but it actually didn't protect against threats from the Zizians. The mere fact that I wasn't optimizing for PR (lying about my agenda, as Somni said) was what made me not a direct enemy (although still a collaborator) in their eyes.</p>
<h3 id="philosophy-blogging-interlude-2-december-2019">Philosophy Blogging Interlude 2! (December 2019)</h3>
<p>I had a pretty productive blogging spree in December 2019. In addition to a number of <a href="/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/">more</a> <a href="/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/">minor</a> <a href="/2019/Dec/i-want-to-be-the-one/">posts</a> <a href="/2019/Dec/promises-i-can-keep/">on</a> <a href="/2019/Dec/comp/">this</a> <a href="/2019/Dec/more-schelling/">blog</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XbXJZjwinkoQXu4db/funk-tunul-s-legacy-or-the-legend-of-the-extortion-war">and</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away">on</a> <em><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point">Less</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrLkMFd88b4FRMwC6/don-t-double-crux-with-suicide-rock">Wrong</a></em>, I also got out some more significant posts bearing on my agenda.</p>
<p>On this blog, in <a href="/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/">"Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender"</a>, I finally got out at least a partial reply to <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">Ozy Brennan's June 2018 reply</a> to <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"</a>, affirming the relevance of an analogy Ozy had made between the socially-constructed natures of money and social gender, while denying that the analogy supported gender by self-identification. (I had been <a href="/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#reply-to-ozy">working on a more exhaustive reply</a>, but hadn't managed to finish whittling it into a shape that I was totally happy with.)</p>
<p>I also polished and pulled the trigger on <a href="/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/">"On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties'"</a>, my reply to Yudkowsky's implicit political concession to me back in March. I had been reluctant to post it based on an intuition of, "My childhood hero was trying to <em>do me a favor</em>; it would be a betrayal to reject the gift." The post itself explained why that intuition was crazy, but <em>that</em> just brought up more anxieties about whether the explanation constituted leaking information from private conversations—but I had chosen my words carefully such that it wasn't. ("Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist [...] he's <em>effectively</em> doing your cause a favor" was something I could have plausibly written in the possible world where the antecedent was true.) Jessica said the post seemed good.</p>
<p>On <em>Less Wrong</em>, the mods had just announced <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review">a new end-of-year Review event</a>, in which the best posts from the year before would be reviewed and voted on, to see which had stood the test of time and deserved to be part of our canon of cumulative knowledge. (That is, this Review period starting in late 2019 would cover posts published in <em>2018</em>.)</p>
<p>This provided me with <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/qXwmMkEBLL59NkvYR/the-lesswrong-2018-review-posts-need-at-least-2-nominations/comment/d4RrEizzH85BdCPhE">an affordance</a> to write some posts critiquing posts that had been nominated for the Best-of-2018 collection that I didn't think deserved such glory. In response to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms">"Decoupling <em>vs.</em> Contextualizing Norms"</a> (which had been <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/wejvnw6QnWrvbjgns">cited in a way that I thought obfuscatory during the "Yes Implies the Possibility of No" trainwreck</a>), I wrote <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling">"Relevance Norms; Or, Grecian Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary"</a>, appealing to our <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/">academically standard theory of how context affects meaning</a> to explain why "decoupling <em>vs.</em> contextualizing norms" is a false dichotomy.</p>
<p>More significantly, in reaction to Yudkowsky's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases">"Meta-Honesty: Firming Up Honesty Around Its Edge Cases"</a>, I published <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly">"Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think"</a>,<sup id="fnref:not-lying-title"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:not-lying-title">25</a></sup> explaining why I thought "Meta-Honesty" was relying on an unproductively narrow sense of "honesty", because the ambiguity of natural language makes it easy to deceive people without technically lying.</p>
<p>I thought that one cut to the heart of the shocking behavior that we had seen from Yudkowsky lately. The "hill of meaning in defense of validity" affair had been driven by Yudkowsky's obsession with not technically lying, on two levels: he had proclaimed that asking for new pronouns "Is. Not. Lying." (as if <em>that</em> were the matter that anyone cared about—as if conservatives and gender-critical feminists should just pack up and go home after it had been demonstrated that trans people aren't <em>lying</em>), and he had seen no interest in clarifying his position on the philosophy of language, because he wasn't lying when he said that preferred pronouns weren't lies (as if <em>that</em> were the matter my posse cared about—as if I should keep honoring him as my caliph after it had been demonstrated that he hadn't <em>lied</em>). But his Sequences had <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument">articulated a higher standard</a> than merely not-lying. If he didn't remember, I could at least hope to remind everyone else.</p>
<p>I also wrote a little post, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to">"Free Speech and Triskadekaphobic Calculators"</a>, arguing that it should be easier to have a rationality/alignment community that just does systematically correct reasoning than a politically savvy community that does systematically correct reasoning except when that would taint AI safety with political drama, analogous to how it's easier to build a calculator that just does correct arithmetic, than a calculator that does correct arithmetic except that it never displays the result 13. In order to build a "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia">triskadekaphobic</a> calculator", you would need to "solve arithmetic" anyway, and the resulting product would be limited not only in its ability to correctly compute <code>6 + 7</code> but also the infinite family of calculations that include 13 as an intermediate result: if you can't count on <code>(6 + 7) + 1</code> being the same as <code>6 + (7 + 1)</code>, you lose the associativity of addition.</p>
<h3 id="a-newtonmas-party-december-2019">A Newtonmas Party (December 2019)</h3>
<p>On 20 December 2019, Scott Alexander messaged me on Discord—that I shouldn't answer if it would be unpleasant, but that he was thinking of asking about autogynephilia on the next <em>Slate Star Codex</em> survey, and wanted to know if I had any suggestions about question design, or if I could suggest any "intelligent and friendly opponents" to consult. After reassuring him that he shouldn't worry about answering being unpleasant ("I am actively at war with the socio-psychological forces that make people erroneously think that talking is painful!"), I referred him to my friend <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/">Tailcalled</a>, who had a lot of experience conducting surveys and ran a "Hobbyist Sexologists" Discord server, which seemed likely to have some friendly opponents.</p>
<p>The next day (I assume while I still happened to be on his mind), Scott also <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/LJp2PYh3XvmoCgS6E">commented on</a> "Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist", my post from back in October replying to his "Against Lie Inflation."</p>
<p>I was frustrated with his reply, which I felt was not taking into account points that I had already covered in detail. A few days later, on the twenty-fourth, I <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7">succumbed to</a> <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/wFRtLj2e7epEjhWDH">the temptation</a> <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/8DKi7eAuMt7PBYcwF">to blow up at him</a> in the comments.</p>
<p>After commenting, I noticed what day it was and added a few more messages to our Discord chat—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>okay, maybe speech is sometimes painful<br>
the <em>Less Wrong</em> comment I just left you is really mean<br>
and you know it's not because I don't like you<br>
you know it's because I'm genuinely at my wit's end<br>
after I posted it, I was like, "Wait, if I'm going to be this mean to Scott, maybe Christmas Eve isn't the best time?"<br>
it's like the elephant in my brain is gambling that by being socially aggressive, it can force you to actually process information about philosophy which you otherwise would not have an incentive to<br>
I hope you have a merry Christmas </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then, as an afterthought—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>oh, I guess we're Jewish<br>
that attenuates the "is a hugely inappropriately socially-aggressive blog comment going to ruin someone's Christmas" fear somewhat </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Scott messaged back at 11:08 the next morning, Christmas Day. He explained that the thought process behind his comment was that he still wasn't sure where we disagreed and didn't know how to proceed except to dump his understanding of the philosophy (which would include things I already knew) and hope that I could point to the step I didn't like. He didn't know how to convince me of his sincerity and rebut my accusations of him motivatedly playing dumb (which he was inclined to attribute to the malign influence of Michael Vassar's gang).</p>
<p>I explained that the reason for those accusations was that I <em>knew</em> he knew about strategic equivocation, because he taught everyone else about it (as in his famous posts about <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/">the motte-and-bailey doctrine</a> and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world">the noncentral fallacy</a>). And so when he acted like he didn't get it when I pointed out that this also applied to "trans women are women", that just seemed <em>implausible</em>.</p>
<p>He asked for a specific example. ("Trans women are women, therefore trans women have uteruses" being a bad example, because no one was claiming that.) I quoted <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191223235051/https://www.thenation.com/article/trans-runner-daily-caller-terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-martina-navratilova/">an article from the <em>The Nation</em></a>: "There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn't acknowledge that trans women <em>are in fact women</em>." Scott agreed that this was stupid and wrong and a natural consequence of letting people use language the way he was suggesting (!).</p>
<p>I didn't think it was fair to ordinary people to expect them to go as deep into the philosophy-of-language weeds as I could before being allowed to object to this kind of chicanery. I thought "pragmatic" reasons to not just use the natural clustering that you would get by impartially running a clustering algorithm on the subspace of configuration space relevant to your goals, basically amounted to "wireheading" (optimizing someone's map for looking good rather than reflecting the territory) or "war" (optimizing someone's map to not reflect the territory in order to manipulate them). If I were to transition today and didn't pass as well as Jessica, and everyone felt obligated to call me a woman, they would be wireheading me: making me think my transition was successful, even though it wasn't. That's not a nice thing to do to a rationalist.</p>
<p>Scott thought that trans people had some weird thing going on in their brains such that being referred to as their natal sex was intrinsically painful, like an electric shock. The thing wasn't an agent, so the <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">injunction to refuse to give in to extortion</a> didn't apply. Having to use a word other than the one you would normally use in order to avoid subjecting someone to painful electric shocks was worth it.</p>
<p>I thought I knew things about the etiology of transness such that I didn't think the electric shock was inevitable, but I didn't want the conversation to go there if it didn't have to. I didn't have to ragequit the so-called "rationalist" community over a complicated empirical question, only over bad philosophy. Scott said he might agree with me if he thought the tradeoff were unfavorable between clarity and utilitarian benefit—or if he thought it had the chance of snowballing like in his "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning".</p>
<p>I pointed out that what sex people are is more relevant to human social life than whether lightning comes before thunder. He said that the problem in his parable was that people were being made ignorant of things, whereas in the transgender case, no one was being kept ignorant; their thoughts were just following a longer path.</p>
<p>I was skeptical of the claim that no one was "really" being kept ignorant. If you're sufficiently clever and careful and you remember how language worked when Airstrip One was still Britain, then you can still think, internally, and express yourself as best you can in Newspeak. But a culture in which Newspeak is mandatory, and all of Oceania's best philosophers have clever arguments for why Newspeak doesn't distort people's beliefs doesn't seem like a culture that could solve AI alignment.</p>
<p>I linked to Zvi Mowshowitz's post about how <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">the claim that "everybody knows" something</a> gets used to silence people trying to point out the thing: in this case, basically, "'Everybody knows' our kind of trans women are sampled from (part of) the male multivariate trait distribution rather than the female multivariate trait distribution, why are you being a jerk and pointing this out?" But I didn't think that everyone knew.<sup id="fnref:survey-whether-everyone-knows"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:survey-whether-everyone-knows">26</a></sup> I thought the people who sort-of knew were being intimidated into doublethinking around it.</p>
<p>At this point, it was almost 2 <em>p.m.</em> (the paragraphs above summarizing a larger volume of typing), and Scott mentioned that he wanted to go to the Event Horizon Christmas party, and asked if I wanted to come and continue the discussion there. I assented, and thanked him for his time; it would be really exciting if we could avoid a rationalist civil war.</p>
<p>When I arrived at the party, people were doing a reading of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dhj9dhiwhq3DX6W8z/hero-licensing">the "Hero Licensing" dialogue epilogue</a> to <a href="https://equilibriabook.com/toc/"><em>Inadequate Equilibria</em></a>, with Yudkowsky himself playing the Mysterious Stranger. At some point, Scott and I retreated upstairs to continue our discussion. By the end of it, I was feeling more assured of Scott's sincerity, if not his competence. Scott said he would edit in a disclaimer note at the end of "... Not Man for the Categories".</p>
<p>It would have been interesting if I also got the chance to talk to Yudkowsky for a few minutes, but if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to recount any details of that here due to the privacy rules I'm following.</p>
<p>The rest of the party was nice. People were reading funny GPT-2 quotes from their phones. At one point, conversation happened to zag in a way that let me show off the probability fact I had learned during Math and Wellness Month. A MIRI researcher sympathetically told me that it would be sad if I had to leave the Bay Area, which I thought was nice. There was nothing about the immediate conversational context to suggest that I might have to leave the Bay, but I guess by this point, my existence had become a context.</p>
<p>All in all, I was feeling less ragequitty about the rationalists<sup id="fnref:no-scare-quotes"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:no-scare-quotes">27</a></sup> after the party—as if by credibly threatening to ragequit, the elephant in my brain had managed to extort more bandwidth from our leadership. The note Scott added to the end of "... Not Man for the Categories" still betrayed some philosophical confusion, but I now felt hopeful about addressing that in a future blog post explaining my thesis that unnatural category boundaries were for "wireheading" or "war".</p>
<p>It was around this time that someone told me that I wasn't adequately taking into account that Yudkowsky was "playing on a different chessboard" than me. (A public figure focused on reducing existential risk from artificial general intelligence is going to sense different trade-offs around Kolmogorov complicity strategies than an ordinary programmer or mere worm focused on <em>things that don't matter</em>.) No doubt. But at the same time, I thought Yudkowsky wasn't adequately taking into account the extent to which some of his longtime supporters (like Michael or Jessica) were, or had been, counting on him to uphold certain standards of discourse (rather than chess)?</p>
<p>Another effect of my feeling better after the party was that my motivation to keep working on my memoir of the Category War vanished—as if I was still putting weight on a <a href="https://unstableontology.com/2019/09/10/truth-telling-is-aggression-in-zero-sum-frames/">zero-sum frame</a> in which the memoir was a nuke that I only wanted to use as an absolute last resort.</p>
<p>Ben wrote (Subject: "Re: state of Church leadership"):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seems to [me] that according to Zack's own account, even writing the memoir <em>privately</em> feels like an act of war that he'd rather avoid, not just using his own territory as he sees fit to create <em>internal</em> clarity around a thing. </p>
<p>I think this has to mean <em>either</em><br>
(a) that Zack isn't on the side of clarity except pragmatically where that helps him get his particular story around gender and rationalism validated<br>
<em>or</em><br>
(b) that Zack has ceded the territory of the interior of his own mind to the forces of anticlarity, not for reasons, but just because he's let the anticlaritarians dominate his frame.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or, I pointed out, (c) I had ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind <em>to Eliezer Yudkowsky in particular</em>, and while I had made a lot of progress unwinding this, I was still, still not done, and seeing him at the Newtonmas party set me back a bit.</p>
<p>"Riley" reassured me that finishing the memoir privately would be clarifying and cathartic <em>for me</em>. If people in the Caliphate came to their senses, I could either not publish it, or give it a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.</p>
<p>(It does not have a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.)</p>
<h3 id="further-discourses-on-what-the-categories-were-made-for-januaryfebruary-2020">Further Discourses on What the Categories Were Made For (January–February 2020)</h3>
<p>Michael told me he had changed his mind about gender and the philosophy of language. We talked about it on the phone. He said that the philosophy articulated in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb">"A Human's Guide to Words"</a> was inadequate for politicized environments where our choice of ontology is constrained. If we didn't know how to coin a new third gender, or teach everyone the language of "clusters in high-dimensional configuration space," our actual choices for how to think about trans women were basically three: creepy men (the TERF narrative), crazy men (the medical model), or a protected class of actual woman.<sup id="fnref:reasons-not-to-carve"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:reasons-not-to-carve">28</a></sup></p>
<p>According to Michael, while "trans women are real women" was a lie (in the sense that he agreed that me and Jessica and Ziz were not part of the natural cluster of biological females), it was <em>also</em> the case that "trans women are not real women" was a lie (in the sense that the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories were wrong). "Trans women are women" could be true in the sense that truth is about processes that create true maps, such that we can choose the concepts that allow discourse and information flow. If the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories are a cause of silencing, then—under present conditions—we had to choose the "protected class" story in order for people like Ziz to not be silenced.</p>
<p>My response (more vehemently when thinking on it a few hours later) was that this was a <em>garbage bullshit</em> appeal to consequences. If I wasn't going to let Ray Arnold get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people feel safe," I shouldn't let Michael get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people aren't oppressed." Maybe the wider world was ontology-constrained to those three choices, but I was aspiring to higher nuance in my writing.</p>
<p>"Thanks for being principled," he replied.</p>
<hr>
<p>On 10 February 2020, Scott Alexander published <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/">"Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"</a>, an analysis of the results of the autogynephilia/autoandrophilia questions on the recent <em>Slate Star Codex</em> survey. Based on eyeballing the survey data, Alexander proposed "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" as a "very boring" theory.</p>
<p>I appreciated the endeavor of getting real data, but I was unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner; I've only just recently gotten around to <a href="/2023/Dec/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/">polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post</a>. Briefly, I can see how it looks like a natural leap if you're verbally reasoning about "gender", but on my worldview, a hypothesis that puts "gay people (cis and trans)" in the antecedent is not boring and takes on a big complexity penalty, because that group is heterogeneous with respect to the underlying mechanisms of sexuality. I already don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately. Given that, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse: it's grouping together lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity. What causal mechanism could that correspond to?</p>
<p>(I do like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy">hypernym</a> <em>autogenderphilia</em>.)</p>
<h3 id="a-private-document-about-a-disturbing-hypothesis-early-2020">A Private Document About a Disturbing Hypothesis (early 2020)</h3>
<p>There's another extremely important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.</p>
<p>Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason AI alignment is. In <a href="https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/">rich domains</a>, attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint and finding the <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked">nearest unblocked strategies</a> that circumvent it. The intent of privacy norms is to conceal information. But <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory"><em>information</em> in Shannon's sense</a> is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text.</p>
<p>If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information but also wants to comply with privacy norms has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm that a coalition <em>can</em> coordinate on enforcing, the whistleblower has an incentive to stay only just shy of being that egregious.</p>
<p>Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact <em>more</em> furious rather than less that he managed to do it without violating the norm against lying, I should not be so foolish as to think myself innocent and beyond reproach for not having "really said it."</p>
<p>Having considered all this, I want to tell you about how I spent a number of hours from early May 2020 to early July 2020 working on a private Document about a disturbing hypothesis that had occurred to me earlier that year.</p>
<p>Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children—that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of behavior for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys.</p>
<p>Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults <a href="/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf">has been meta-analyzed at</a> <a href="/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> ≈ 1.31 standard deviations for men and <em>d</em> ≈ 0.96 for women.) A solid majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria <a href="/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf">ended up growing out of it by puberty</a>. In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under <a href="/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf">a "watchful waiting" protocol</a>) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.</p>
<p>What made this shift in norms crazy, in my view, was not just that transitioning younger children is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision that was being made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans <em>adults</em>, even though a supermajority of trans adults were in <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-the-taxonomy">the late-onset taxon</a> and therefore had never resembled these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids in our Society are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions<sup id="fnref:narcissistic-delusions"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:narcissistic-delusions">29</a></sup> of guys like me.</p>
<p>That much was obvious to anyone who's had their Blanchardian enlightenment, and wouldn't have been worth the effort of writing a special private Document about. The disturbing hypothesis that occurred to me in early 2020 was that, in the culture of the current year, affirmation of a cross-sex identity might happen to kids who weren't HSTS-taxon at all.</p>
<p>Very small children who are just learning what words mean say a lot of things that aren't true (I'm a grown-up; I'm a cat; I'm a dragon), and grownups tend to play along in the moment as a fantasy game, but they don't <em>coordinate to make that the permanent new social reality</em>. </p>
<p>But if the grown-ups have been trained to believe that "trans kids know who they are"—if they're emotionally eager at the prospect of having a transgender child, or fearful of the damage they might do by not affirming—they might selectively attend to confirming evidence that the child "is trans", selectively ignore contrary evidence that the child "is cis", and end up reinforcing a cross-sex identity that would not have existed if not for their belief in it—a belief that the same people raising the same child ten years ago wouldn't have held. (<a href="https://archive.is/FJNII">A September 2013 article in <em>The Atlantic</em></a> by the father of a male child with stereotypically feminine interests was titled "My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It", not "My Daughter Is Trans; Get Over It".)</p>
<p>Crucially, if gender identity isn't an innate feature of toddler psychology, <em>the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."</em> If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what nice smart liberal people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? <a href="/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/">Toddlers are not very sexually dimorphic</a>, but sex differences in play style and social behavior tend to emerge within a few years. There were no cars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and yet <a href="/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf">the effect size of the sex difference in preference for toy vehicles is a massive <em>d</em> ≈ 2.44</a>, about one and a half times the size of the sex difference in adult height.</p>
<p>(I'm going with the MtF case without too much loss of generality; I don't think the egregore is quite as eager to transition females at this age, but the dynamics are probably similar.)</p>
<p>What happens when the kid develops a self-identity as a girl, only to find out, potentially years later, that she noticeably doesn't fit in with the (cis) girls on the <a href="/2019/Dec/more-schelling/">many occasions that no one has explicitly spelled out in advance</a> where people are using "gender" (perceived sex) to make a prediction or decision?</p>
<p>Some might protest, "But what's the harm? She can always change her mind later if she decides she's actually a boy." I don't doubt that if the child were to clearly and distinctly insist, "I'm definitely a boy," the nice smart liberal grown-ups would unhesitatingly accept that.</p>
<p>But the harm I'm theorizing is <em>not</em> that the child has an intrinsic male identity that requires recognition. (What is an "identity", apart from the ordinary factual belief that one is of a particular sex?) Rather, the concern is that social transition prompts everyone, <em>including the child themself</em>, to use their mental models of girls (juvenile female humans) to make (mostly subconscious rather than deliberative) predictions and decisions about the child, which will be a systematically worse statistical fit than their models of boys (juvenile male humans), because the child is, in fact, a boy (juvenile male human), and those miscalibrated predictions and decisions will make the child's life worse in a complicated, illegible way that doesn't necessarily result in the child spontaneously asserting, "I prefer that you call me a boy" against the current of everyone in the child's life having accepted otherwise for as long the kid can remember.</p>
<p>Scott Alexander has written about how <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/">concept-shaped holes can be impossible to notice</a>. In a culture whose <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/">civic religion</a> celebrates being trans and denies that gender has truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, there are concept-shaped holes that would make it hard for a kid to notice the hypothesis "I'm having a systematically worse childhood than I otherwise would have because all the grown-ups in my life have agreed I was a girl since I was three years old, even though all of my actual traits are sampled from the joint distribution for juvenile male humans, not juvenile female humans."</p>
<p>The epistemic difficulties extend to the grown-ups as well. I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation will find the story I've laid out above pretty compelling, but the parents are likely to be unmoved. They <em>know</em> they didn't coach the child to claim to be a girl. On what grounds could a stranger who wasn't there (or a skeptical family friend who sees the kid maybe once a month) assert that subconscious influence must be at work?</p>
<p>In the early twentieth century, a German schoolteacher named Wilhelm von Osten claimed to have taught his horse, Clever Hans, to do arithmetic and other intellectual feats. One could ask, "How much is 2/5 plus 1/2?" and the stallion would first stomp his hoof nine times, and then ten times—representing 9/10ths, the correct answer. An investigation concluded that no deliberate trickery was involved: Hans could often give the correct answer when questioned by a stranger, demonstrating that von Osten couldn't be secretly signaling the horse when to stop stomping. But further careful experiments by Oskar Pfungst revealed that Hans was picking up on unconscious cues "leaked" by the questioner's body language as the number of stomps approached the correct answer: for instance, Hans couldn't answer questions that the questioner themself didn't know.<sup id="fnref:pfungst"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:pfungst">30</a></sup></p>
<p>Notably, von Osten didn't accept Pfungst's explanation, continuing to believe that his intensive tutoring had succeeded in teaching the horse arithmetic.</p>
<p>It's hard to blame him, really. He had spent more time with Hans than anyone else. Hans observably <em>could</em> stomp out the correct answers to questions. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a horse could learn arithmetic, why should he trust Pfungst's nitpicky experiments over the plain facts of his own intimately lived experience?</p>
<p>But what was in question wasn't the observations of Hans's performance, only the interpretation of what those observations implied about Hans's psychology. As Pfungst put it: "that was looked for in the animal which should have been sought in the man."</p>
<p>Similarly, in the case of a reputedly transgender three-year-old, a skeptical family friend isn't questioning observations of what the child said, only the interpretation of what those observations imply about the child's psychology. From the family's perspective, the evidence is clear: the child claimed to be a girl on many occasions over a period of months, and expressed sadness about being a boy. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a child could be transgender, what could make them doubt the obvious interpretation of their own intimately lived experience?</p>
<p>From the skeptical family friend's perspective, there are a number of anomalies that cast serious doubt on what the family thinks is the obvious interpretation.</p>
<p>(Or so I'm imagining how this might go, hypothetically. The following illustrative vignettes may not reflect real events.)</p>
<p>For one thing, there may be clues that the child's information environment did not provide instruction on some of the relevant facts. Suppose that, six months before the child's social transition went down, another family friend had explained to the child that "Some people don't have penises." (Nice smart liberal grown-ups in the current year don't feel the need to be more specific.) Growing up in such a culture, the child's initial gender statements may reflect mere confusion rather than a deep-set need—and later statements may reflect social reinforcement of earlier confusion. Suppose that after social transition, the same friend explained to the child, "When you were little, you couldn't talk, so your parents had to guess whether you were a boy or a girl based on your parts." While this claim does convey the lesson that there's a customary default relationship between gender and genitals (in case that hadn't been clear before), it also reinforces the idea that the child is transgender.</p>
<p>For another thing, from the skeptical family friend's perspective, it's striking how the family and other grown-ups in the child's life seem to treat the child's statements about gender starkly differently than the child's statements about everything else.</p>
<p>Imagine that, around the time of the social transition, the child responded to "Hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—something like, "practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local cultural environment" (of nice smart liberal grown-ups who talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). In the skeptic's view, if you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.</p>
<p>Perhaps even more striking is the way that the grown-ups seem to interpret the child's conflicting or ambiguous statements about gender. Imagine that, around the time social transition was being considered, a parent asked the child whether the child would prefer to be addressed as "my son" or "my daughter."</p>
<p>Suppose the child replied, "My son. Or you can call me she. Everyone should call me she or her or my son."</p>
<p>The grown-ups seem to mostly interpret exchanges like this as indicating that while the child is trans, she's confused about the gender of the words "son" and "daughter". They don't seem to pay much attention to the competing hypothesis that the child knows he's his parents "son", but is confused about the implications of she/her pronouns.</p>
<p>It's not hard to imagine how differential treatment by grown-ups of gender-related utterances could unintentionally shape outcomes. This may be clearer if we imagine a non-gender case. Suppose the child's father's name is John Smith, and that after a grown-up explains <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_(name)#Generational_titles">"Sr."/"Jr." generational suffixes</a> after it happened to come up in fiction, the child declares that his name is John Smith, Jr. now. Caregivers are likely to treat this as just a cute thing that the kid said, quickly forgotten by all. But if caregivers feared causing psychological harm by denying a declared name change, one could imagine them taking the child's statement as a prompt to ask followup questions. ("Oh, would you like me to call you <em>John</em> or <em>John Jr.</em>, or just <em>Junior</em>?") With enough followup, it seems plausible that a name change to "John Jr." would meet with the child's assent and "stick" socially. The initial suggestion would have come from the child, but most of the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7EcMhL26zFNbJ3ED/optimization">optimization</a>—the selection that this particular statement should be taken literally and reinforced as a social identity, while others are just treated as a cute but not overly meaningful thing the kid said—would have come from the adults.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the matter of the child's behavior and personality. Suppose that, around the same time that the child's social transition was going down, a parent reported the child being captivated by seeing a forklift at Costco. A few months later, another family friend remarked that maybe the child is very competitive, and that "she likes fighting so much because it's the main thing she knows of that you can <em>win</em>."</p>
<p>I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation would look at observations like these and say, Well, yes, he's a boy; boys like vehicles (<em>d</em> ≈ 2.44!) and boys like fighting. Some of them might suggest that these observations should be counterindicators for transition—that the cross-gender verbal self-reports are less decision-relevant than the fact of a male child behaving in male-typical ways. But nice smart liberal grown-ups in the current year don't think that way.</p>
<p>One might imagine that the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances">inferential distance</a> between nice smart liberal grown-ups and people from an older generation (or a skeptical family friend) might be crossed by talking about it, but it turns out that talking doesn't help much when people have radically different priors and interpret the same evidence differently.</p>
<p>Imagine a skeptical family friend wondering (about four months after the social transition) what "being a girl" means to the child. How did the kid <em>know</em>?</p>
<p>A parent obliges to ask the child: "Hey kiddo, somebody wants to know how you know that you are a girl."</p>
<p>"Why?"</p>
<p>"He's interested in that kind of thing."</p>
<p>"I know that I'm a girl because girls like specific things like rainbows and I like rainbows so I'm a girl."</p>
<p>"Is that how you knew in the first place?"</p>
<p>"Yeah."</p>
<p>"You know there are a lot of boys who like rainbows."</p>
<p>"I don't think boys like rainbows so well—oh hey! Here this ball is!"</p>
<p>(When recounting this conversation, the parent adds that rainbows hadn't come up before, and that the child was looking at a rainbow-patterned item at the time of answering.)</p>
<p>It would seem that the interpretation of this kind of evidence depends on one's prior convictions. If you think that transition is a radical intervention that might pass a cost–benefit analysis for treating rare cases of intractable sex dysphoria, answers like "because girls like specific things like rainbows" are disqualifying. (A fourteen-year-old who could read an informed-consent form would be able to give a more compelling explanation than that, but a three-year-old just isn't ready to make this kind of decision.) Whereas if you think that some children have a gender that doesn't match their assigned sex at birth, you might expect them to express that affinity at age three, without yet having the cognitive or verbal abilities to explain it. Teasing apart where these two views make different predictions seems like it should be possible, but might be beside the point, if the real crux is over <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">what categories are made for</a>. (Is sex an objective fact that sometimes merits social recognition, or is it better to live in a Society where people are free to choose the gender that suits them?)</p>
<p>Anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occurred to me in early 2020, about something that <em>could</em> happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and I'm not an expert on child development. And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who <em>was</em> "actually trans" whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.</p>
<p>For some reason, it seemed important that I draft a Document about it with lots of citations to send to a few friends. I thought about cleaning it up and publishing it as a public blog post (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin; and, Harms from Misleading Training Data"), but for some reason, that didn't seem as pressing.</p>
<p>I put an epigraph at the top:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you love someone, tell them the truth.</p>
<p>—Anonymous</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Given that I spent so many hours on this little research and writing project in May–July 2020, I think it makes sense for me to mention it at this point in my memoir, where it fits in chronologically. I have an inalienable right to talk about my own research interests, and talking about my own research interests obviously doesn't violate any norm against leaking private information about someone else's family, or criticizing someone else's parenting decisions.</p>
<h3 id="the-new-york-times-pounces-june-2020">The <em>New York Times</em> Pounces (June 2020)</h3>
<p>On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from <em>New York Times</em> reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley." I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk but that had been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to <em>be</em> a "community" and protect the group's status (<em>e.g.</em>, from <em>New York Times</em> reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light?) might incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of systematically correct reasoning that made the community valuable in the first place.</p>
<p>He never got back to me. Three weeks later, all existing <em>Slate Star Codex</em> posts were taken down. A <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-safety-by-revealing-my-real-name-so-i-am-deleting-the-blog/">lone post on the main page</a> explained that the <em>New York Times</em> piece was going to reveal Alexander's real last name and he was taking his posts down as a defensive measure. (No blog, no story?) I <a href="/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=21731ba6f1191">wrote a script</a> (<code>slate_starchive.py</code>) to replace the <em>Slate Star Codex</em> links on this blog with links to the most recent Internet Archive copy.</p>
<h3 id="philosophy-blogging-interlude-3-mid-2020">Philosophy Blogging Interlude 3! (mid-2020)</h3>
<p>I continued my philosophy of language work, looking into the academic literature on formal models of communication and deception. I wrote a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution">couple</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist">posts</a> encapsulating what I learned from that—and I continued work on my "advanced" philosophy of categorization thesis, the sequel to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"</a></p>
<p>The disclaimer note that Scott Alexander had appended to "... Not Man for the Categories" after our Christmas 2019 discussion had said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had hoped that the Israel/Palestine example above made it clear that you have to deal with the consequences of your definitions, which can include confusion, muddling communication, and leaving openings for deceptive rhetorical strategies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is certainly an improvement over the original text without the note, but I took the use of the national borders metaphor to mean that Scott still hadn't gotten my point about there being laws of thought underlying categorization: mathematical principles governing <em>how</em> choices of definition can muddle communication or be deceptive. (But that wasn't surprising; <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/">by Scott's own admission</a>, <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/">he's not a math guy</a>.)</p>
<p>Category "boundaries" are a useful visual metaphor for explaining the cognitive function of categorization: you imagine a "boundary" in configuration space containing all the things that belong to the category.</p>
<p>If you have the visual metaphor, but you don't have the math, you might think that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with squiggly or discontinuous category "boundaries", just as there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Alaska not being part of the contiguous United States. It may be inconvenient that you can't drive from Alaska to Washington without going through Canada, but it's not wrong that the borders are drawn that way: Alaska really is governed by the United States.</p>
<p>But if you do have the math, a moment of introspection will convince you that the analogy between category "boundaries" and national borders is shallow.</p>
<p>A two-dimensional political map tells you which areas of the Earth's surface are under the jurisdiction of which government. In contrast, category "boundaries" tell you which regions of very high-dimensional configuration space correspond to a word/concept, which is useful <em>because</em> that structure can be used to make probabilistic inferences. You can use your observations of some aspects of an entity (some of the coordinates of a point in configuration space) to infer category-membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about aspects that you haven't yet observed.</p>
<p>But the trick only works to the extent that the category is a regular, non-squiggly region of configuration space: if you know that egg-shaped objects tend to be blue, and you see a black-and-white photo of an egg-shaped object, you can get close to picking out its color on a color wheel. But if egg-shaped objects tend to blue <em>or</em> green <em>or</em> red <em>or</em> gray, you wouldn't know where to point to on the color wheel.</p>
<p>The analogous algorithm applied to national borders on a political map would be to observe the longitude of a place, use that to guess what country the place is in, and then use the country to guess the latitude—which isn't typically what people do with maps. Category "boundaries" and national borders might both be illustrated similarly in a two-dimensional diagram, but philosophically, they're different entities. The fact that Scott Alexander was appealing to national borders to defend gerrymandered categories, suggested that he didn't understand this.</p>
<p>I still had some deeper philosophical problems to resolve, though. If squiggly categories were less useful for inference, why would someone want a squiggly category boundary? Someone who said, "Ah, but I assign higher utility to doing it this way" had to be messing with you. Squiggly boundaries were less useful for inference; the only reason you would realistically want to use them would be to commit fraud, to pass off pyrite as gold by redefining the word "gold".</p>
<p>That was my intuition. To formalize it, I wanted some sensible numerical quantity that would be maximized by using "nice" categories and get trashed by gerrymandering. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information">Mutual information</a> was the obvious first guess, but that wasn't it, because mutual information lacks a "topology", a notion of "closeness" that would make some false predictions better than others by virtue of being "close".</p>
<p>Suppose the outcome space of <em>X</em> is <code>{H, T}</code> and the outcome space of <em>Y</em> is <code>{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8}</code>. I wanted to say that if observing <em>X</em>=<code>H</code> concentrates <em>Y</em>'s probability mass on <code>{1, 2, 3}</code>, that's more useful than if it concentrates <em>Y</em> on <code>{1, 5, 8}</code>. But that would require the numerals in <em>Y</em> to be numbers rather than opaque labels; as far as elementary information theory was concerned, mapping eight states to three states reduced the entropy from log<sub>2</sub> 8 = 3 to log<sub>2</sub> 3 ≈ 1.58 no matter which three states they were.</p>
<p>How could I make this rigorous? Did I want to be talking about the variance of my features conditional on category membership? Was "connectedness" what I wanted, or was it only important because it cut down the number of possibilities? (There are 8!/(6!2!) = 28 ways to choose two elements from <code>{1..8}</code>, but only 7 ways to choose two contiguous elements.) I thought connectedness was intrinsically important, because we didn't just want <em>few</em> things, we wanted things that are similar enough to make similar decisions about.</p>
<p>I put the question to a few friends in July 2020 (Subject: "rubber duck philosophy"), and Jessica said that my identification of the variance as the key quantity sounded right: it amounted to the expected squared error of someone trying to guess the values of the features given the category. It was okay that this wasn't a purely information-theoretic criterion, because for problems involving guessing a numeric quantity, bits that get you closer to the right answer were more valuable than bits that didn't.</p>
<h3 id="a-couple-of-impulsive-emails-september-2020">A Couple of Impulsive Emails (September 2020)</h3>
<p>I decided on "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" as the title for my advanced categorization thesis. Writing it up was a major undertaking. There were a lot of nuances to address and potential objections to preëmpt, and I felt that I had to cover everything. (A reasonable person who wanted to understand the main ideas wouldn't need so much detail, but I wasn't up against reasonable people who wanted to understand.)</p>
<p>In September 2020, Yudkowsky Tweeted <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1304824253015945216">something about social media incentives prompting people to make nonsense arguments</a>, and something in me boiled over. The Tweets were fine in isolation, but I rankled at it given the absurdly disproportionate efforts I was undertaking to unwind his incentive-driven nonsense. I left <a href="/images/davis-snarky_pleading_reply.png">a snarky, pleading reply</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1304838346695348224">vented on my own timeline</a> (with preview images from the draft of "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Who would have thought getting @ESYudkowsky's robot cult to stop trying to trick me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical facts determining whether or not I should cut my dick off) would involve so much math?? OK, I guess the math part isn't surprising, but—<sup id="fnref:trying-to-trick-me"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:trying-to-trick-me">31</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>My rage-boil continued into staying up late writing him an angry email, which I mostly reproduce below (with a few redactions for either brevity or compliance with privacy norms, but I'm not going to clarify which).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To: Eliezer Yudkowsky <[redacted]><br>
Cc: Anna Salamon <[redacted]><br>
Date: Sunday 13 September 2020 2:24 <em>a.m.</em><br>
Subject: out of patience </p>
<blockquote>
<p>"I could beg you to do it in order to save me. I could beg you to do it in order to avert a national disaster. But I won't. These may not be valid reasons. There is only one reason: you must say it, because it is true."<br>
—<em>Atlas Shrugged</em> by Ayn Rand</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dear Eliezer (cc Anna as mediator):</p>
<p>Sorry, I'm getting <em>really really</em> impatient (maybe you saw my impulsive Tweet-replies today; and I impulsively called Anna today; and I've spent the last few hours drafting an even more impulsive hysterical-and-shouty potential <em>Less Wrong</em> post; but now I'm impulsively deciding to email you in the hopes that I can withhold the hysterical-and-shouty post in favor of a lower-drama option of your choice): <strong>is there <em>any</em> way we can resolve the categories dispute <em>in public</em>?! Not</strong> any object-level gender stuff which you don't and shouldn't care about, <strong><em>just</em> the philosophy-of-language part.</strong></p>
<p>My grievance against you is <em>very</em> simple. <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You are <em>on the public record</em> claiming that</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I claim that this is <em>false</em>. <strong>I think I <em>am</em> standing in defense of truth when I insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning, when I have an <em>argument</em> for <em>why</em> my preferred usage does a better job of "carving reality at the joints" and the one bringing my usage into question doesn't have such an argument. And in particular, "This word usage makes me sad" doesn't count as a relevant argument.</strong> I <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution">agree that words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings</a>, but precisely <em>because</em> words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings, there's no <em>reason</em> to challenge someone's word usage except <em>because</em> of the hidden probabilistic inference it embodies.</p>
<p>Imagine one day David Gerard of /r/SneerClub said, "Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist!" And you replied: "No, I'm not! That's a lie." And imagine E.T. Jaynes was still alive and piped up, "You are <em>ontologcially confused</em> if you think that's a false assertion. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on words, such <em>white supremacist</em>, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning." Suppose you emailed Jaynes about it, and he brushed you off with, "But I didn't <em>say</em> you were a white supremacist; I was only targeting a narrow ontology error." In this hypothetical situation, I think you might be pretty upset—perhaps upset enough to form a twenty-one month grudge against someone whom you used to idolize?</p>
<p>I agree that pronouns don't have the same function as ordinary nouns. However, <strong>in the English language as actually spoken by native speakers, I think that gender pronouns <em>do</em> have effective "truth conditions" <em>as a matter of cognitive science</em>.</strong> If someone said, "Come meet me and my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her", and then that friend turned out to look like me, <strong>you would be surprised</strong>.</p>
<p>I don't see the <em>substantive</em> difference between "You're not standing in defense of truth (...)" and "I can define a word any way I want." [...]</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>As far as your public output is concerned, it <em>looks like</em> you either changed your mind about how the philosophy of language works, or you think gender is somehow an exception. If you didn't change your mind, and you don't think gender is somehow an exception, is there some way we can <em>get that on the public record <strong>somewhere</strong>?!</em></p>
<p>As an example of such a "somewhere", I had asked you for a comment on my explanation, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"</a> (with non-politically-hazardous examples about dolphins and job titles) [...] I asked for a comment from Anna, and at first she said that she would need to "red team" it first (because of the political context), and later she said that she was having difficulty for other reasons. Okay, the clarification doesn't have to be on <em>my</em> post. <strong>I don't care about credit! I don't care whether or not anyone is sorry! I just need this <em>trivial</em> thing settled in public so that I can stop being in pain and move on with my life.</strong></p>
<p>As I mentioned in my Tweets today, I have a longer and better explanation than "... Boundaries?" mostly drafted. (It's actually somewhat interesting; the logarithmic score doesn't work as a measure of category-system goodness because it can only reward you for the probability you assign to the <em>exact</em> answer, but we <em>want</em> "partial credit" for almost-right answers, so the expected squared error is actually better here, contrary to what you said in <a href="https://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/">the "Technical Explanation"</a> about what Bayesian statisticians do). [...]</p>
<p>The <em>only</em> thing I've been trying to do for the past twenty-one months
is make this simple thing established "rationalist" knowledge:</p>
<p>(1) For all nouns <em>N</em>, you can't define <em>N</em> any way you want, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">for at least 37 reasons</a>.</p>
<p>(2) <em>Woman</em> is such a noun.</p>
<p>(3) Therefore, you can't define the word <em>woman</em> any way you want.</p>
<p>(Note, <strong>this is <em>totally compatible</em> with the claim that trans women are women, and trans men are men, and nonbinary people are nonbinary!</strong> It's just that <strong>you have to <em>argue</em> for why those categorizations make sense in the context you're using the word</strong>, rather than merely asserting it with an appeal to arbitrariness.)</p>
<p>This is <strong>literally <em>modus ponens</em></strong>. I don't understand how you expect people to trust you to save the world with a research community that <em>literally cannot perform modus ponens.</em></p>
<p>[...] See, I thought you were playing on the chessboard of <em>being correct about rationality</em>. Such that, if you accidentally mislead people about your own philosophy of language, you could just ... issue a clarification? I and Michael and Ben and Sarah and ["Riley"] <em>and Jessica</em> wrote to you about this and explained the problem in <em>painstaking</em> detail, <strong>and you stonewalled us.</strong> Why? <strong>Why is this so hard?!</strong></p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>No. The thing that's been driving me nuts for twenty-one months is that <strong><em><span style="color: #F00000;">I expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth</span></strong></em>. I remain,</p>
<p>Your heartbroken student,<br>
Zack M. Davis</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I followed it with another email after I woke up the next morning:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To: Eliezer Yudkowsky <[redacted]><br>
Cc: Anna Salamon <[redacted]><br>
Date: Sunday 13 September 2020 11:02 <em>a.m.</em><br>
Subject: Re: out of patience </p>
<p>[...] The sinful and corrupted part wasn't the <em>initial</em> Tweets; the sinful and corrupted part is this <strong>bullshit stonewalling</strong> when your Twitter followers and me and Michael and Ben and Sarah and ["Riley"] and Jessica tried to point out the problem. I've <em>never</em> been arguing against your private universe [...]; the thing I'm arguing against in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"</a> (and <strong>my <a href="https://github.com/zackmdavis/Category_War/blob/cefa98c3abe/unnatural_categories_are_optimized_for_deception.md">unfinished draft sequel</a></strong>, although that's more focused on what Scott wrote) is the <strong><em>actual text</em> you <em>actually published</em>, not your private universe.</strong></p>
<p>[...] you could just <strong>publicly clarify your position on the philosophy of language</strong> the way an intellectually-honest person would do if they wanted their followers to have correct beliefs about the philosophy of language?!</p>
<p>You wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243">Using language in a way</a> <em>you</em> dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297">Now, maybe as a matter of policy</a>, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem with "it's a policy debate about how to use language" is that it completely elides the issue that some ways of using language <em>perform better</em> at communicating information, such that <strong>attempts to define new words or new senses of <em>existing</em> words should come with a justification for why the new sense is <em>useful for conveying information</em>, and that <em>is</em> a matter of Truth.</strong> Without such a justification, it's hard to see why you would <em>want</em> to redefine a word <em>except</em> to mislead people with strategic equivocation.</p>
<p><a id="literally-a-white-supremacist"></a>It is <em>literally true</em> that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a white supremacist (if I'm allowed to define "white supremacist" to include "someone who <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok">once linked to the 'Race and intelligence' <em>Wikipedia</em> page</a> in a context that implied that it's an empirical question").</p>
<p>It is <em>literally true</em> that 2 + 2 = 6 (if I'm allowed to define '2' as •••-many).</p>
<p>You wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096">The more technology advances, the further</a> we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That's kind of like defining Solomonoff induction, and then saying, "Having said this, we've built AGI." No, you haven't said all the facts! Configuration space is <em>very high-dimensional</em>; we don't have <em>access</em> to the individual points. Trying to specify the individual points ("say all the facts") would be like what you wrote about in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels">"Empty Labels"</a>—"not just that I can vary the label, but that I can get along just fine without any label at all." Since that's not possible, we need to group points into the space together so that we can use observations from the coordinates that we <em>have</em> observed to make probabilistic inferences about the coordinates we haven't. But there are <em>mathematical laws</em> governing how well different groupings perform, and those laws <em>are</em> a matter of Truth, not a mere policy debate.</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>But if behavior at equilibrium isn't deceptive, there's just <em>no such thing as deception</em>; I wrote about this on Less Wrong in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist">"Maybe Lying Can't Exist?!"</a> (drawing on the academic literature about sender–receiver games). I don't think you actually want to bite that bullet?</p>
<p><strong>In terms of information transfer, there is an isomorphism between saying "I reserve the right to lie 5% of the time about whether something is a member of category C" and adopting a new definition of C that misclassifies 5% of instances with respect to the old definition.</strong></p>
<p>Like, I get that you're ostensibly supposed to be saving the world and you don't want randos yelling at you in your email about philosophy. But <strong>I thought the idea was that we were going to save the world <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy"><em>by means of</em> doing unusually clear thinking?</a></strong></p>
<p><a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">Scott wrote</a> (with an irrelevant object-level example redacted): "I ought to accept an unexpected [X] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [Y] if it'll save someone's life." (Okay, he added a clarification after I spent Christmas yelling at him; but I think he's still substantially confused in ways that I address in my forthcoming draft post.)</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You wrote</a>: "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning."</p>
<p>I think I've argued pretty extensively this is wrong! <strong>I'm eager to hear counterarguments if you think I'm getting the philosophy wrong.</strong> But ... <strong>"people live in different private universes" is <em>not a counterargument</em>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>It makes sense that you don't want to get involved in gender politics. That's why I wrote "... Boundaries?" using examples about dolphins and job titles, and why my forthcoming post has examples about bleggs and artificial meat.</strong> This shouldn't be <em>expensive</em> to clear up?! This should take like, five minutes? (I've spent twenty-one months of my life on this.) Just one little <em>ex cathedra</em> comment on Less Wrong or <em>somewhere</em> (<strong>it doesn't have to be my post, if it's too long or I don't deserve credit or whatever</strong>; I just think the right answer needs to be public) affirming that you haven't changed your mind about 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong? Unless you <em>have</em> changed your mind, of course?</p>
<p>I can imagine someone observing this conversation objecting, "[...] why are you being so greedy? We all know the <em>real</em> reason you want to clear up this philosophy thing in public is because it impinges on your gender agenda, but Eliezer <em>already</em> threw you a bone with the <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512">'there's probably more than one type of dysphoria' thing.</a> That was already a huge political concession to you! That makes you <em>more</em> than even; you should stop being greedy and leave Eliezer alone."</p>
<p>But as <a href="/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/">I explained in my reply</a> criticizing why I think that argument is <em>wrong</em>, the whole mindset of public-arguments-as-political-favors is <em>crazy</em>. <strong>The fact that we're having this backroom email conversation at all (instead of just being correct about the philosophy of language on Twitter) is <em>corrupt</em>!</strong> I don't want to strike a deal in a political negotiation; I want <em>shared maps that reflect the territory</em>. I thought that's what this "rationalist community" thing was supposed to do? Is that not a thing anymore? If we can't do the shared-maps thing when there's any hint of political context (such that now you <em>can't</em> clarify the categories thing, even as an abstract philosophy issue about bleggs, because someone would construe that as taking a side on whether trans people are Good or Bad), that seems really bad for our collective sanity?! (Where collective sanity is potentially useful for saving the world, but is at least a quality-of-life improver if we're just doomed to die in 15 years no matter what.)</p>
<p><strong>I really used to look up to you.</strong> In my previous interactions with you, I've been tightly <a href="http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/57">cognitively constrained</a> by hero-worship. I was already so starstruck that <em>Eliezer Yudkowsky knows who I am</em>, that the possibility that <em>Eliezer Yudkowsky might disapprove of me</em>, was too terrifying to bear. I really need to get over that, because it's bad for me, and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgrvvp9QzjiFuYwLi/high-status-and-stupidity-why">it's <em>really</em> bad for you</a>. I remain,</p>
<p>Your heartbroken student,<br>
Zack M. Davis</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These emails were pretty reckless by my usual standards. (If I was entertaining some hope of serving as a mediator between the Caliphate and Vassar's splinter group after the COVID lockdowns were over, this outburst wasn't speaking well to my sobriety.) But as the subject line indicates, I was just—out of patience. I had spent years making all the careful arguments I could make. What was there left for me to do but scream?</p>
<p>The result of this recklessness was ... success! Without disclosing anything from any private conversations that may or may not have occurred, Yudkowsky did <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228">publish a clarification on Facebook</a>, that he had meant to criticize only the naïve essentialism of asserting that a word Just Means something and that anyone questioning it is Just Lying, and not the more sophisticated class of arguments that I had been making.</p>
<p>In particular, the post contained this line:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>you are being the bad guy if you try to shut down that conversation by saying that "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There it is! A clear <em>ex cathedra</em> statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories aren't arbitrary. (Only 1 year and 8 months after <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#ex-cathedra-statement-ask">asking for it</a>.) I could quibble with some of Yudkowsky's exact writing choices, which I thought still bore the signature of political squirming,<sup id="fnref:clarification-quibbles"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:clarification-quibbles">32</a></sup> but it would be petty to dwell on quibbles when the core problem had been addressed.</p>
<p>I wrote to Michael, Ben, Jessica, Sarah, and "Riley", thanking them for their support. After successfully bullying Scott and Eliezer into clarifying, I was no longer at war with the robot cult and feeling a lot better (Subject: "thank-you note (the end of the Category War)").</p>
<p>I had a feeling, I added, that Ben might be disappointed with the thank-you note insofar as it could be read as me having been "bought off" rather than being fully on the side of clarity-creation. But I contended that not being at war actually made it emotionally easier to do clarity-creation writing. Now I would be able to do it in a contemplative spirit of "Here's what I think the thing is actually doing" rather than in hatred with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrqxmQr-uto&t=112s">flames on the side of my face</a>.</p>
<h3 id="a-private-catastrophe-december-2020">A Private Catastrophe (December 2020)</h3>
<p><a id="a-dramatic-episode-that-would-fit-here-chronologically"></a>There's a dramatic episode that would fit here chronologically if this were an autobiography (which existed to tell my life story), but since this is a topic-focused memoir (which exists because my life happens to contain this Whole Dumb Story which bears on matters of broader interest, even if my life would not otherwise be interesting), I don't want to spend more wordcount than is needed to briefly describe the essentials.</p>
<p>I was charged by members of the extended Michael Vassar–adjacent social circle with the duty of taking care of a mentally-ill person at my house on 18 December 2020. (We did not trust the ordinary psychiatric system to act in patients' interests.) I apparently did a poor job, and ended up saying something callous on the care team group chat after a stressful night, which led to a chaotic day on the nineteenth, and an ugly falling-out between me and the group. The details aren't particularly of public interest.</p>
<p>My poor performance during this incident <a href="/2020/Dec/liability/">weighs on my conscience</a> particularly because I had <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">previously</a> <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">been</a> in the position of being crazy and benefiting from the help of my friends (including many of the same people involved in this incident) rather than getting sent back to psychiatric prison ("hospital", they call it a "hospital"). Of all people, I had a special debt to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward">"pay it forward"</a>, and one might have hoped that I would also have special skills, that having been on the receiving end of a non-institutional psychiatric tripsitting operation would help me know what to do on the giving end. Neither of those panned out.</p>
<p>Some might appeal to the proverb "All's well that ends well", noting that the person in trouble ended up recovering, and that, while the stress of the incident contributed to a somewhat serious relapse of my own psychological problems on the night of the nineteenth and in the following weeks, I ended up recovering, too. But recovering normal functionality after a traumatic episode doesn't imply a lack of other lasting consequences (to the psyche, to trusting relationships, <em>&c.</em>). I am therefore inclined to dwell on <a href="https://www.alessonislearned.com/">another proverb</a>, "A lesson is learned but the damage is irreversible."</p>
<h3 id="a-false-denouement-january-2021">A False Dénouement (January 2021)</h3>
<p>I published <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">"Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"</a> in January 2021.</p>
<p>I wrote back to Abram Demski regarding his comments from fourteen months before: on further thought, he was right. Even granting my point that evolution didn't figure out how to track probability and utility separately, as Abram had pointed out, the fact that it didn't meant that not tracking it could be an effective AI design. Just because evolution takes shortcuts that human engineers wouldn't didn't mean shortcuts are "wrong". (Rather, there are laws governing which kinds of shortcuts work.)</p>
<p>Abram was also right that it would be weird if reflective coherence was somehow impossible: the AI shouldn't have to fundamentally reason differently about "rewriting code in some 'external' program" and "rewriting 'its own' code." In that light, it made sense to regard "have accurate beliefs" as merely a convergent instrumental subgoal, rather than what rationality is about—as sacrilegious as that felt to type.</p>
<p>And yet, somehow, "have accurate beliefs" seemed more fundamental than other convergent instrumental subgoals like "seek power and resources". Could this be made precise? As a stab in the dark, was it possible that the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6DuJxY8X45Sco4bS2/seeking-power-is-often-robustly-instrumental-in-mdps">theorems on the ubiquity of power-seeking</a> might generalize to a similar conclusion about "accuracy-seeking"? If it didn't, the reason why it didn't might explain why accuracy seemed more fundamental.</p>
<hr>
<p>And really, that should have been the end of the story. At the cost of two years of my life, we finally got a clarification from Yudkowsky that you can't define the word <em>woman</em> any way you like. This suggested poor cognitive returns on investment from interacting with the "rationalist" community—if it took that much effort to correct a problem I had noticed myself, I couldn't expect them to help me with problems I couldn't detect—but I didn't think I was entitled to more. If I hadn't been further provoked, I wouldn't have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war.</p>
<p>It turned out that I would have occasion to continue waging the robot-cult religious civil war. (To be continued.)</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:egan-paraphrasing">
<p>The original quote says "one hundred thousand straights" ... "gay community" ... "gay and lesbian" ... "franchise rights on homosexuality" ... "unauthorized queer." <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:egan-paraphrasing" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:posse-boundary">
<p>Although Sarah Constantin and "Riley" had also been involved in reaching out to Yudkowsky and were included in many subsequent discussions, they seemed like more marginal members of the group that was forming. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:posse-boundary" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:soldiers">
<p>At least, not blameworthy in the same way as someone who committed the same violence as an individual. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:soldiers" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:my-price-for-joining">
<p>The Sequences post referenced here, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining">"Your Price for Joining"</a>, argues that rationalists are too prone to "take their ball and go home" rather than tolerating imperfections in a collective endeavor. To combat this, Yudkowsky proposes a norm:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I claim that I was meeting this standard: I <em>was</em> willing to personally fix the philosophy-of-categorization issue no matter how much effort it took, and the issue <em>did</em> arise from outright bad faith. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:my-price-for-joining" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:named-houses">
<p>It was common practice in our subculture to name group houses. My apartment was "We'll Name It Later." <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:named-houses" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:mike-pseudonym">
<p>I'm not giving Mike a pseudonym because his name is needed for this adorable anecdote to make sense, and I'm not otherwise saying sensitive things about him. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:mike-pseudonym" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:money-attitudes">
<p>Anna was a very busy person who I assumed didn't always have time for me, and I wasn't earning-to-give <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/">anymore</a> after my 2017 psych ward experience made me more skeptical about institutions (including EA charities) doing what they claimed. Now that I'm not currently dayjobbing, I wish I had been somewhat less casual about spending money during this period. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:money-attitudes" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:plausibly">
<p>I was still deep enough in my hero worship that I wrote "plausibly" in an email at the time. Today, I would not consider the adverb necessary. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:plausibly" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:yes-requires-slapfight-highlights">
<p>I particularly appreciated Said Achmiz's <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/EsSdLMrFcCpSvr3pG">defense of disregarding community members' feelings</a>, and <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/WwTPSkNwC89g3Afnd/comment-section-from-05-19-2019/comment/TXbgr7goFtSAZEvZb">Ben's commentary on speech acts that lower the message length of proposals to attack some group</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:yes-requires-slapfight-highlights" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:collaborative-truth-seeking">
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvqd3YiBcrPxXzxQM/what-does-the-word-collaborative-mean-in-the-phrase">No one ever seems to be able to explain to me what this phrase means.</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:collaborative-truth-seeking" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:manslaughter-disanalogy">
<p>For one important disanalogy, perps don't gain from committing manslaughter. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:manslaughter-disanalogy" title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:hidden-draft">
<p>The draft was hidden, but the API apparently didn't filter out comments on hidden posts, and the thread was visible on the third-party <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/">GreaterWrong</a> site; I <a href="https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/issues/2161">filed a bug</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:hidden-draft" title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:what-works-now">
<p>Arnold qualifies this in the next paragraph:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[in public. In private things are much easier. It's <em>also</em> the case that private channels enable collusion—that was an update [I]'ve made over the course of the conversation. ]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even with the qualifier, I still think this deserves a "(!!)". <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:what-works-now" title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:memory">
<p>An advantage of mostly living on the internet is that I have logs of the important things. I'm only able to tell this Whole Dumb Story with this much fidelity because for most of it, I can go back and read the emails and chatlogs from the time. Now that <a href="https://openai.com/blog/whisper/">audio transcription has fallen to AI</a>, maybe I should be recording more real-life conversations? In the case of this meeting, supposedly one of the <em>Less Wrong</em> guys was recording, but no one had it when I asked in October 2022. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:memory" title="Jump back to footnote 14 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:reach-acronym-expansion">
<p>Rationality and Effective Altruism Community Hub <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:reach-acronym-expansion" title="Jump back to footnote 15 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:statement">
<p>Oddly, Kelsey seemed to think the issue was that my allies and I were pressuring Yudkowsky to make a public statement, which he supposedly never does. From our perspective, the issue was that he <em>had</em> made a statement and it was wrong. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:statement" title="Jump back to footnote 16 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:implicit-understanding">
<p>As I had <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#noncentral-fallacy">explained to him earlier</a>, Alexander's famous <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world">post on the noncentral fallacy</a> condemned the same shenanigans he praised in the context of gender identity: Alexander's examples of the noncentral fallacy had been about edge-cases of a negative-valence category being inappropriately framed as typical (abortion is murder, taxation is theft), but "trans women are women" was the same thing, but with a positive-valence category.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/">"Does the Glasgow Coma Scale exist? Do Comas?"</a> (published just three months before "... Not Man for the Categories"), Alexander defends the usefulness of "comas" and "intelligence" in terms of their predictive usefulness. (The post uses the terms "predict", "prediction", "predictive power", <em>&c.</em> 16 times.) He doesn't say that the Glasgow Coma Scale is justified because it makes people happy for comas to be defined that way, because that would be absurd. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:implicit-understanding" title="Jump back to footnote 17 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:kolmogorov-common-interests-contrast">
<p>The last of the original Sequences had included a post, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes">"Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes"</a>, which argued that different projects should not regard themselves "as competing for a limited supply of rationalists with a limited capacity for support; but, rather, creating more rationalists and increasing their capacity for support." It was striking that the "Kolmogorov Option"-era Caliphate took the opposite policy: throwing politically unpopular projects (like autogynephila- or human-biodiversity-realism) under the bus to protect its own status. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:kolmogorov-common-interests-contrast" title="Jump back to footnote 18 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:linkrot">
<p>The original <em>TechCrunch</em> comment would seem to have succumbed to <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs#link-rot">linkrot</a>, but it was quoted by <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/">Moldbug</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/@2045singularity/white-supremacist-futurism-81be3fa7020d">others</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:linkrot" title="Jump back to footnote 19 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:pleonasm">
<p>The pleonasm here ("to me" being redundant with "I thought") is especially galling coming from someone who's usually a good writer! <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:pleonasm" title="Jump back to footnote 20 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:i-statements">
<p>At best, "I" statements make sense in a context where everyone's speech is considered part of the "official record". Wrapping controversial claims in "I think" removes the need for opponents to immediately object for fear that the claim will be accepted onto the shared map. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:i-statements" title="Jump back to footnote 21 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:altruistic-criticism">
<p>Specifically, altruism towards the author. Altruistic benefits to other readers are a reason for criticism to be public. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:altruistic-criticism" title="Jump back to footnote 22 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:communism-analogy">
<p>That is, there's an analogy between economically valuable labor, and intellectually productive criticism: if you accept the necessity of paying workers money in order to get good labor out of them, you should understand the necessity of awarding commenters status in order to get good criticism out of them. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:communism-analogy" title="Jump back to footnote 23 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:ftx">
<p>On the other hand, there's a case to be made that the connection between white-collar crime and the problems we saw with the community is stronger than it first appears. Trying to describe the Blight to me in April 2019, Ben wrote, "People are systematically conflating corruption, accumulation of dominance, and theft, with getting things done." I imagine a rank-and-file EA looking at this text and shaking their head at how hyperbolically uncharitable Ben was being. Dominance, corruption, theft? Where was his evidence for these sweeping attacks on these smart, hard-working people trying to make the world a better place?</p>
<p>In what may be a relevant case study, three and a half years later, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founded by effective altruists as an earning-to-give scheme <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_of_FTX">turned out to be an enormous fraud</a> à la Enron and Madoff. In <em>Going Infinite</em>, Michael Lewis's book on FTX mastermind Sam Bankman-Fried, Lewis describes Bankman-Fried's "access to a pool of willing effective altruists" as the "secret weapon" of FTX predecessor Alameda Research: Wall Street firms powered by ordinary greed would have trouble trusting employees with easily-stolen cryptocurrency, but ideologically-driven EAs could be counted on to be working for the cause. Lewis describes Alameda employees seeking to prevent Bankman-Fried from deploying a trading bot with access to $170 million for fear of losing all that money "that might otherwise go to effective altruism". <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-infinite/">Zvi Mowshowitz's review of <em>Going Infinite</em></a> recounts Bankman-Fried in 2017 urging Mowshowitz to disassociate with Ben because Ben's criticisms of EA hurt the cause. (It's a small world.)</p>
<p>Rank-and-file EAs can contend that Bankman-Fried's crimes have no bearing on the rest of the movement, but insofar as FTX looked like a huge EA success before it turned out to all be a lie, Ben's 2019 complaints are looking prescient to me in retrospect. (And insofar as charitable projects are harder to evaluate than whether customers can withdraw their cryptocurrency, there's reason to fear that <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/drowning-children-rare/">other apparent EA successes may also be illusory</a>.) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ftx" title="Jump back to footnote 24 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:not-lying-title">
<p>The ungainly title was softened from an earlier draft following feedback from the posse; I had originally written "... Surprisingly Useless". <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:not-lying-title" title="Jump back to footnote 25 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:survey-whether-everyone-knows">
<p>On this point, it may be instructive to note that a 2023 survey <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/06/third-of-britons-dont-know-trans-women-born-male/">found that only 60% of the UK public knew that "trans women" were born male</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:survey-whether-everyone-knows" title="Jump back to footnote 26 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:no-scare-quotes">
<p>Enough to not even scare-quote the term here. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:no-scare-quotes" title="Jump back to footnote 27 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:reasons-not-to-carve">
<p>I had identified three classes of reasons not to carve reality at the joints: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests">coordination (wanting everyone to use the same definitions)</a>, wireheading (making the map look good, at the expense of it failing to reflect the territory), and war (sabotaging someone else's map to make them do what you want). Michael's proposal would fall under "coordination" insofar as it was motivated by the need to use the same categories as everyone else. (Although you could also make a case for "war" insofar as the civil-rights model winning entailed that adherents of the TERF or medical models must lose.) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:reasons-not-to-carve" title="Jump back to footnote 28 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:narcissistic-delusions">
<p>Reasonable trans people aren't the ones driving <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">the central tendency of the trans rights movement</a>. When analyzing a wave of medical malpractice on children, I think I'm being literal in attributing causal significance to a political motivation to affirm the narcissistic delusions of (some) guys like me, even though not all guys like me are delusional, and many guys like me are doing fine maintaining a non-guy social identity without spuriously dragging children into it. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:narcissistic-delusions" title="Jump back to footnote 29 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:pfungst">
<p>Oskar Pfungst, <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33936/33936-h/33936-h.htm"><em>Clever Hans (The Horse Of Mr. Von Osten): A Contribution To Experimental Animal and Human Psychology</em></a>, translated from the German by Carl L. Rahn <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:pfungst" title="Jump back to footnote 30 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:trying-to-trick-me">
<p>I anticipate that some readers might object to the "trying to trick me into cutting my dick off" characterization. But as <a href="/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/#physical-injuries">Ben had pointed out earlier</a>, we have strong reason to believe that an information environment of ubiquitous propaganda was creating medical transitions on the margin. I think it made sense for me to use emphatic language to highlight what was actually at stake here! <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:trying-to-trick-me" title="Jump back to footnote 31 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:clarification-quibbles">
<p>The way that the post takes pains to cast doubt on whether someone who is alleged to have committed the categories-are-arbitrary fallacy is likely to have actually committed it ("the mistake seems like it wouldn't actually fool anybody or be committed in real life, I am unlikely to be sympathetic to the argument", "But be wary of accusing somebody of planning to do this, if you haven't documented them actually doing it") is in stark contrast to the way that "A Human's Guide to Words" had taken pains to emphasize that categories shape cognition regardless of whether someone is consciously trying to trick you (<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences">"drawing a boundary in thingspace is not a neutral act [...] Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind"</a>). I'm suspicious that the change in emphasis reflects the need to not be seen as criticizing the "pro-trans" coalition, rather than any new insight into the subject matter.</p>
<p>The first comment on the post linked to "... Not Man for the Categories". Yudkowsky replied, "I assumed everybody reading this had already read <a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words">https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words</a>", a <em>non sequitur</em> that could be taken to suggest (but did not explicitly say) that the moral of "... Not Man for the Categories" was implied by "A Human's Guide to Words" (in contrast to my contention that "... Not Man for the Categories" was getting it wrong). <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:clarification-quibbles" title="Jump back to footnote 32 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia2023-12-18T22:15:00-08:002023-12-18T22:15:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-12-18:/2023/Dec/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/<blockquote>
<p>Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?</p>
<p>—<a href="https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656">Steven Kaas</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/">"Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender"</a>, Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 <em>Slate Star Codex</em> reader survey, proposes what …</p><blockquote>
<p>Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?</p>
<p>—<a href="https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656">Steven Kaas</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/">"Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender"</a>, Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 <em>Slate Star Codex</em> reader survey, proposes what he calls a "very boring" hypothesis of "autogenderphilia": "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender."</p>
<p>Explaining my view on this "boring hypothesis" turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viPPjojmChxLGPE2v/the-dilemma-science-or-bayes">Science <em>vs.</em> Bayescraft</a> thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer <a href="https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-weird-and-you-need-to-be-prepared-for-that/">sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds</a> to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, well, bluntly, I also expect my parsimony intuitions to get the right answer in the high-dimensional real world outside of a single forced-choice survey question.</p>
<p>Let me explain.</p>
<p>In my ontology of how the world works, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" is <em>not</em> a boring hypothesis. In my ontology, this is a shockingly weird hypothesis, where I can read the English words, but I have a lot of trouble parsing the English words into a model in my head, because the antecedent, "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, then ...", already takes a massive prior probability penalty, because that category is multiply disjunctive over the natural space of biological similarities: you're grouping together lesbians <em>and</em> gay men <em>and</em> heterosexual males with a female gender identity <em>and</em> heterosexual females with a male gender identity, and trying to make claim about what members of this group are like.</p>
<p>What do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, such that we expect to make useful inductive inferences about this group?</p>
<p>Well, they're all human; that buys you a lot of similarities!</p>
<p>But your hypothesis isn't about humans-in-general, it's specifically about people who identify "identify as a gender, and [are] attracted to that gender".</p>
<p>So the question becomes, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they <em>don't</em> have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?</p>
<p>Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQIA+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared social experience could induce similarities.</p>
<p>But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction in a way that doesn't seem very culture-sensitive. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they <em>don't</em> have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?</p>
<p>I think the answer here is just "Nothing."</p>
<p>Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypotheses of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans">predictions about lots of stuff</a>.</p>
<p>Sometimes I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf">lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males</a>. (That is, it looks like <em>homosexuality</em>—not the kind of trans people Scott and I know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we mostly don't know.)</p>
<p>But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a <em>within</em>-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a different <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water">underlying causal structure</a>. "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">as a political coalition</a> (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live the same kind of lives. (Indeed, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)</p>
<p>And so, given that I already don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that correspond to?</p>
<p>Imagine a Bayesian network with real-valued variables with a cause C at the root, whose influence propagates to many effects (E₂ ← E₁ ← C → E₃ → E₄ ...). If someone proposes a theory about what happens to the E<sub>i</sub> when C is between 2 and 3 <em>or</em> between 5 and 6 <em>or</em> above 12, that's very unparsimonious: why would such a discontinuous hodge-pause of values for the cause, have consistent effects?</p>
<p>In my worldview, "gender" (as the thing trans women and cis women have in common) looks like a hodge-podge as far as biology is concerned. (It can be real socially to the extent that people believe it's real and act accordingly, which creates the relevant <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence">conditional independence</a> structure in their social behavior, but the kinds of sexuality questions under consideration don't seem like they would be sociologically determined.</p>
<p>Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this might seem dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm explaining why I can't take Scott Alexander's theory seriously without even addressing the survey data that he thinks his theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" technobabble, in the face of <em>empirical</em> survey data, huh?</p>
<p>The thing is, I don't see my theory as making particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine <em>being</em> him/her?" questions asked on the survey.</p>
<p>The reason I'm sold that autogynephila (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.4 on someone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a massive confluence of a <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">real-life experiences</a> and observations in a naturalistic setting. (That's how people <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance">locate</a> which survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)</p>
<p>If you're not acquainted in a naturalistic setting with the phenomenon your survey is purporting to measure, you're not going to be able to sensibly interpret your survey results. Alexander writes that his data "suggest[s] that identifying as a gender is a prerequisite to autogenderphilia to it." This is obvious nonsense. There are mountains of AGP erotica produced by and for men who identify as men.</p>
<p>The surprising thing is that if you look at what trans women say to each other when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories over and over again (examples from /r/MtF: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/qy4ncb/i_get_horny_when_i_do_girl_things_is_this_a_fetish/">"I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?"</a>, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/q8k57y/is_the_body_swap_fetish_inherently_pretrans/">"Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?"</a>, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rd78kw/could_it_be_a_sex_fantasy/">"Could it be a sex fantasy?"</a>, <em>&c.</em>, <em>ad infinitum</em>).</p>
<p>The AGP experiences described in such posts by males who identify as trans women seem strikingly similar to AGP experiences in males who identify as men. I think the very boring hypothesis here is that these are mostly the same people—that identifying as a trans woman is an effect (of <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">AGP and other factors</a>) rather than a cause.</p>
<p>After observing this kind of pattern in the world, it's a good idea to do surveys to get some data to learn more about what's going on with the pattern. Are these accounts of AGP coming from a visible minority of trans women, or is it actually a majority? When <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/">82% of /r/MtF users say Yes to a "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realized you were trans?" survey</a>, that makes me think it's a majority.</p>
<p>When you pose a superficially similar-sounding question to a different group, are you measuring the same real-world phenomenon in that other group? Maybe, but I think this is nonobvious.</p>
<p>And it contexts where it's not politically inconvenient for him, Scott Alexander agrees with me: he wrote about this methodological issue in <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/">"My IRB Nightmare"</a>, expressing skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.</p>
<p>Some psychiatrists love this test. I hate it. Patients will say "Yes, that absolutely describes me!" and someone will diagnose them with bipolar disorder. Then if you ask what they meant, they'd say something like "Once my local football team made it to the Super Bowl and I was really happy, but then they lost and I was really sad." I don't even want to tell you how many people get diagnosed bipolar because of stuff like this.</p>
<p>There was a study that supposedly proved this test worked. But parts of it confused me, and it was done on a totally different population that didn't generalize to hospital inpatients.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reason it makes sense for Alexander to be skeptical of the screening test is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder" don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People already had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" <a href="https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/">as a taxon</a>. As an experienced clinician, when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've <em>seen</em> in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a certainty—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to immediately jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."</p>
<p>The failure of surveys to generalize between populations shouldn't even be surprising when you consider the ambiguity and fuzziness of natural language: faced with a question, and prompted to give a forced-choice Yes/No or 1–5 response, people will assume the question was "meant for them" and try to map the words into some reference point in their experience. If the question <em>wasn't</em> "meant for them"—if people who have never had a manic episode are given a set of questions formulated for a population of bipolar people—or if actual women are given a set of questions formulated for a population of males with a sex fantasy about being female—I think you <em>do</em> get a lot of "Am I happy then sad sometimes? Sure, I guess so" out-of-distribution response behavior that doesn't capture what's really going on. In slogan form, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kNxhKWvixtKW5anS/you-are-not-measuring-what-you-think-you-are-measuring">you are not measuring what you think you are measuring</a>.</p>
<p>If Alexander is wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think he should be still more wary that that a survey <em>about sexuality</em> might not generalize to people <em>of different sexes</em>. Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of psychological sex differences (for there were no trucks or makeup in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), sexuality is the one domain where I think we have strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism">empathic inference</a> to fail.</p>
<p>This is why I expect the <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/">standard cope</a> of "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither Alexander's nor <a href="/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf">Moser 2009</a>'s); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like to suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl. The common and normal experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body just isn't the same thing as cross-sex embodiment fantasies, even if people who aren't familiar with the <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">lurid details of the latter</a> don't realize this.</p>
<p>The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable is because my skepticism is specifically about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the extra work to try to figure out whether the question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a higher-bandwidth channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response, like free-form testimony. The account quoted in Alexander's post from a woman claiming to experience AGP does more to convince me that AGP in women might be a real thing than <em>Slate Star Codex</em> survey data showing straight cis women giving a mean response of 2.4 to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine <em>being</em> her?" question. (And even then, I would want to ask followup questions to hopefully distinguish true female AGP from situations like when <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-agp">a female acquaintance of mine initially seemed to empathize with the concept, but found it bizarre when I elaborated a little more</a>.)</p>
<p>While the promise of psychological research is that it might <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">teach us things about ourselves that we don't already know</a>, I still mostly expect it to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/adding-up-to-normality">all add up to normality</a>—to retrodict the things we've already observed without the research.</p>
<p>My disquiet with Alexander's "Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender" (and similarly Aella's <a href="https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia">"Everyone Has Autogynephilia"</a>) is that it visibly fails to add up to normality. In a world where it was <em>actually true</em> that "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]", I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking to look like the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts, and that's just not what I see.</p>
<p>Consider <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808">this quip from Twitter</a>—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The eternal trans lesbian question: So do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?</p>
<p>The answer: Yes</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women and non-transitioned AGP men very frequently. (I speak from experience.) Do cis lesbians often feel this way about each other? I'm inclined to doubt it—<em>and the author seems to agree with me</em> by calling the phenomenon a "trans lesbian" question rather than just a "lesbian" question! I think the very boring hypothesis here is that this is because trans lesbians are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians. And I think that authors who can't bring themselves to say as much in those words are <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">going to end up confusing themselves about the statistical structure of real life</a>, even if they can agree that trans lesbians and straight men have some things in common.</p>Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress2023-12-15T09:25:00-08:002023-12-15T09:25:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-12-15:/2023/Dec/hrunkner-unnerby-and-the-shallowness-of-progress/<p>Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?—ever since early 2020, I keep finding myself thinking about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting">"B"</a> <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotThreads">story</a> of Vernor Vinge's <em>A Deepness in the Sky</em>.</p>
<p>The B story focuses on spider-like aliens native to a …</p><p>Apropos of absolutely nothing—and would I lie to you about that?—ever since early 2020, I keep finding myself thinking about Hrunkner Unnerby, one of the characters in the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwoLinesNoWaiting">"B"</a> <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotThreads">story</a> of Vernor Vinge's <em>A Deepness in the Sky</em>.</p>
<p>The B story focuses on spider-like aliens native to a planet whose star "turns off" for 215 years out of every 250, during which time life on the planet goes into hibernation. The aliens' reproductive cycle is synced with the appearance and disappearance of their sun, resulting in discrete birth cohorts: almost all children in a generation are the same age, conceived just before the world goes into hibernation, and born when the sun re-emerges. Rare "oophase" (out of phase) children are regarded as unnatural and discriminated against.</p>
<p>Our protagonists are Sherkaner Underhill (mad scientist extraordinaire), Gen. Victory Smith (an oophase military prodigy, and Underhill's wife), and Sgt. Hrunkner Unnberby (an engineer, and Underhill and Smith's friend and comrade from the Great War). After the war, Underhill and Smith deliberately conceive children out of phase. Underhill is motivated by a zeal for progress: a champion of plans to use the recent discovery of atomic power to keep civilization running while the sun is off, he reasons that the anti-oophase taboo will be unnecessary in the new world they're building. Smith seems motivated to pass on her oophase legacy to her children and give them a more supportive environment than the one she faced.</p>
<p>Unnerby is horrified, but tries to keep his disapproval to himself, so as not to poison the relationship. Besides being old war friends, Underhill and Smith depend on Unnerby for peacetime engineering work, preparing for the coming nuclear age. Underhill and Smith name one of their younger children after Unnerby ("Little Hrunk").</p>
<p>Still, there are tensions. When Unnerby visits Underhill's home and meets the children, Underhill expresses a wish that Unnerby had visited earlier, prompting the latter to acknowledge the elephant in the room:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Unnerby started to make some weak excuse, stopped. He just couldn't pretend anymore. Besides, Sherkaner was so much easier to face than the General. "You know why I didn't come before, Sherk. In fact, I wouldn't be here now if General Smith hadn't given me explicit orders. I'd follow her through Hell, you know that. But she wants more. She wants acceptance of your perversions. I—You two have such beautiful children, Sherk. How could you do such a thing to them?"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Underhill is resolute, convinced that Society's prejudices can be overcome after they are shown to be irrational. (The fact that one of the children is intellectually challenged doesn't faze him; that could be a coincidence.) The children host a "Children's Hour of Science" radio program, without their oophase status being public knowledge at first. Underhill hopes the program will help normalize oophase people when the stars' ages eventually leak.</p>
<p>During a crisis in which the children have been kidnapped by agents of a foreign power, Smith blows up at Unnerby when he makes some tone-deaf remarks. "For years you've pretended to be a friend, but always sneering and hating us. Enough!" she cries out, striking him. She continues to hold a grudge against him for years.</p>
<p>Smith and Unnerby eventually meet again as the sun is growing cold. Unnerby feels the unease of people being awake this long into the Dark, and senses the same in Smith. "You feel the same as I do about it, don't you?" he asks her. She reluctantly concedes this, and notes that their Society is running up against a lot of instinct.</p>
<p>I appreciate the relative even-handedness with which Vinge presents this fictional world. A lot of authors in the current year would be determined to present the "progressive" position as self-evidently correct and its enemies as malevolent fools (even in an alien Society which has no <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist">Watsonian</a> reason to map cleanly onto our own), but I find it easy to empathize with both Smith and Unnerby.</p>
<p>And apropos of absolutely nothing, I empathize with Unnberby's efforts to reconcile his duties as a friend with his understanding of what is right. The people he loves having been taken possesion of by an idea, he knows to separate the idea from the people. The sergeant is ever-ready to serve, even as he chokes on the message that has no hope of getting through past an ideologue's exuberance: every improvement is necessarily a change, but <em>not every change is an improvement</em>.</p>Beyond the Binary2023-12-12T13:00:00-08:002023-12-12T13:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-12-12:/2023/Dec/beyond-the-binary/<blockquote>
<p>Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Do not at the outset of your career make the all too common error of mistaking names for things. Names are only conventional signs for identifying things. Things are the reality that counts. If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not alter matters by changing its name.</p>
<p>—W. E. B. duBois</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A common misconception about words is that they have definitions: look up the definition, and that tells you everything to know about that word ... right?</p>
<p>It can't actually work that way—not in principle. The problem—one of them, anyway—is that with a sufficiently active imagination, you can imagine edge cases that satisfy the definition, but aren't what you really mean by the word.</p>
<p>What's a <em>woman</em>? An adult human female. (Let's <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">not play dumb about this</a> today.) Okay, but then what does <em>female</em> mean? One common and perfectly serviceable definition: of the sex that produces larger gametes—ova, eggs.</p>
<p>That's one common and perfectly serviceable definition in the paltry, commonplace <em>real</em> world—but not in <em>the world of the imagination!</em> We could <em>imagine</em> the existence of a creature that looks and acts exactly like an adult human male down to the finest details, <em>except</em> that its (his?) gonads produce eggs, not sperm! So one might argue that this would be a <em>female</em> and presumably a <em>woman</em>, according to our definitions, yes?</p>
<p>But if you saw this person on the street or even slept in their bed, you wouldn't want to call them a woman, because everything about them that you can observe looks like that of an adult human male. If you're not a reproductive health lab tech and don't look at the photographs in biology textbooks, you'll never <em>see</em> the gametes someone's body produces. (You can see semen, but the individual spermatozoa are too small to look at without a microscope; people <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1439-0531.2012.02105.x">didn't even know that ova and sperm <em>existed</em> until the 17th century</a>.) Does that mean this common definition of <em>female</em> isn't perfectly serviceable after all?</p>
<p>No, because humans whose gonads produce eggs but appear male in every other aspect, are something I just made up out of thin air for the purposes of this blog post; they don't exist in the real world. What this really shows is that the cognitive technology of "words" having "definitions" doesn't work in the world of the imagination, because the world of the imagination encompasses (at a minimum) <em>all possible configurations of matter</em>. Words are <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">short messages that compress information about the world</a>, but what it means for the world to contain compressible information is that some things in the world are more probable than others.</p>
<p>To see why, let's take a brief math detour and review some elementary information theory. Instead of the messy real world, take a restricted setting: the world of strings of 20 bits. Suppose you wanted to devise an efficient code to represent elements of this world with shorter strings, such that you could say (for example) <code>01100</code> (in the efficient code, using just 5 bits) and the people listening to you would know that what you actually saw in the world was (for example) <code>01100001110110000010</code>.</p>
<p>If every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, this can't be done: there are 2<sup>20</sup> (= 1,048,576) length-20 strings and only 2<sup>5</sup> (= 32) length-5 codewords; there aren't enough codewords to go around to cover all the strings in this world. It's worse than that: if every length-20 bitstring in the world has equal probability, you can't have labels that compress information at all: if you said that the first 19 bits of something you saw in the world were <code>0110000111011000001</code>, the people listening to you would be completely clueless as to whether the whole thing was <code>0110000111011000001</code><strong><code>0</code></strong> or <code>0110000111011000001</code><strong><code>1</code></strong>. Just locating a book in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel">Jose Luis Borges's Library of Babel</a> is mathematically equivalent to writing it yourself.</p>
<p>However, in the world of a <em>non-uniform probability distribution</em> over strings of 20 bits, compression—and therefore language—is possible. Say, if almost all the bitstrings you actually saw in the world were either all-zeros (<code>00000000000000000000</code>) or all-ones (<code>11111111111111111111</code>), with a very few exceptions that were still <em>mostly</em> one bit or the other (like <code>00010001000000000000</code> or <code>11101111111011011111</code>), then you could devise an efficient encoding.</p>
<p>To <em>be</em> efficient, you'd want to reserve the shortest words for the most common cases: like <code>00</code> in the code to mean <code>00000000000000000000</code> in the world and <code>01</code> to mean <code>11111111111111111111</code>. Then you could have slightly-longer words that encode all the various exceptions, like maybe the merely-eleven-bit encoding <code>10110101110</code> could represent <code>00100010000000000000</code> in the world (<code>1</code> to indicate that this is one of the exceptions, a following <code>0</code> to indicate that <em>most</em> of the bits are <code>0</code>, followed by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_omega_coding">Elias self-delimiting integer codes</a> for 3 (<code>110</code>) and 7 (<code>101110</code>) to indicate that the 3rd and 7th bits are actually <code>1</code>).</p>
<p>Suppose that, even among the very few exceptions that aren't all-zeros or all-ones, the first bit is <em>always</em> in the majority and is never "flipped": you can have exceptions that "look like" <code>00000100000000000000</code> or <code>11011111111101111011</code>, but never <code>10000000000000000000</code> or <code>01111111111111111111</code>.</p>
<p>Then if you wanted an efficient encoding to talk about the two and only two <em>clusters</em> of bitstrings—the mostly-zeros (a majority of <code>00000000000000000000</code> plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped) and the mostly-ones (a majority of <code>11111111111111111111</code> plus a few exceptions with a few bits flipped)—you might want to use the first bit as the "definition" for your codewords—even if most of the various <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences">probabilistic inferences that you wanted to make</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes">on the basis of cluster-membership</a> concerned bits other than the first. The majoritarian first bit, even if you don't care about it in itself, is a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests"><em>simple</em> membership test</a> for the mostly-zeros/mostly-ones category system. </p>
<p>Unfortunately—<em>deeply</em> unfortunately—this is not a math blog. I <em>wish</em> this were a math blog—that I lived in a world where I could afford to do math blogging for the glory of our collective understanding of greater reality. ("Gender?" I would say, confused if not slightly disgusted, "I barely <em>know</em> her.") It would be a better way to live than being condemned to gender blogging in self-defense, hopelessly outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">in a Total Culture War</a> over <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/">the future of</a> <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">my neurotype-demographic</a>. But since I <em>do</em>, somehow, go on living like this—having briefly explained the theory, let's get back to the dreary, how do you say?—<em>application</em>.</p>
<p>Defining sex in terms of gamete size or genitals or chromosomes is like the using the never-flipped first bit in our abstract example about the world of length-20 bitstrings. It's not that people directly care about gametes or chromosomes or even genitals in most everyday situations. (You're not trying to mate with most of the people you meet in everyday situations, and sex chromosomes weren't discovered until the <em>20th</em> century.) It's that that these are <em>discrete</em> features that are <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water">causally</a> entangled with everything <em>else</em> that differs between females and males—including many <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1">correlated</a> statistical differences of various <a href="/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/">effect sizes</a>, and differences that are harder to articulate or measure, and differences that haven't even been discovered yet (as gametes and chromosomes hadn't respectively been discovered yet in the 16th and 19th centuries) but can be theorized to exist because <em>sex</em> is a very robust abstraction that you need in order to understand the design of biological creatures.</p>
<p>Discrete features make for better word definitions than high-dimensional statistical regularities, even if most of the everyday inferential utility of using the word comes from the high-dimensional statistical correlates. A dictionary definition is just a helpful pointer to help people pick out "the same" <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro">natural abstraction</a> in their <em>own</em> world-model.</p>
<p>(Gamete size is a particularly good definition for the natural category of <em>sex</em> because the concept of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy">anisogamy</a> generalizes across species that have different sex determination systems and sexual anatomy. In birds, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZW_sex-determination_system">the presence or absence of a <em>W</em> chromosome determines whether an animal is female</a>, in contrast to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system">the <em>Y</em> chromosome's determination of maleness in mammals</a>, and some reptiles' sex is determined by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination">the temperature of an lain egg while it develops</a>. And let's not get started on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca">cloaca</a>.)</p>
<p>But because our brains are good at using sex-category words to simultaneously encode predictions about <em>both</em> absolute discrete differences and high-dimensional statistical regularities of various effect sizes, without our being consciously aware of the cognitive work being done, it's easy to get confused by verbal gymnastics if you don't know the theory.</p>
<p>I sometimes regret that so many of my attempts to talk about trans issues end up focusing on psychological sex differences. I guess I'm used to it now, but at first, this was a weird position for me to be in! (For a long time, I <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism">really didn't want to believe in psychological sex differences</a>.) But it keeps happening because it's a natural thing to <em>disagree</em> about: the anatomy of pre-op trans women is not really in dispute, so the sex realist's contextual reply to "Why do you care what genitals someone might or might not have under their clothes?" often ends up appealing to some psychological dimension or another, to which the trans advocate <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">can counterreply</a>, "Oh, you want to define gender based on psychology, then? But then the logic of your position forces you to conclude that butch lesbians aren't women! <em>Reductio ad absurdum!</em>"</p>
<p>This is a severe misreading of the sex-realist position. No one wants to <em>define</em> "gender" based on psychology. Mostly, definitions aren't the kind of thing you should have preferences about: you can't coerce reality into changing by choosing different definitions! Rather, there's <em>already</em> a multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, and good definition choices help us coordinate the concepts in different people's heads into a shared map of that territory.</p>
<p><em>One</em> of the many distinctions people sometimes want to make when thinking about the multivariate distribution of bodies and minds in the world, is that between the sexes. But sex is by no means the only way in which people differ! In many situations, you might want to categorize or describe people in many different ways, some more or less discrete <em>versus</em> continuous, or high- <em>versus</em> low-dimensional: age or race or religion or subculture or social class or intelligence or agreeableness.</p>
<p>It's possible that the categories that are salient in a particular culture ought to be revised in order to fit the world better: maybe we <em>should</em> talk about categories like "masculine people" (including both typical men, and butch lesbians) more often! But the typical trans advocate shell game of just replacing "sex" with "gender" and letting people choose their "gender" isn't going to fly, because sex actually exists and we have a need for language to talk about it—or maybe, the fact that we have a need for language to talk about it (the fact that the information we observe admits compression) is what it means for sex to "actually" "exist".</p>
<p>One of the standard gender-critical complaints about trans ideology is that it's sexist on account of basing its categories on regressive sex stereotypes. On the categories-as-compression view, we can see that this complaint has something to it: if you remove the discrete, hard-line differences like genitals and chromosomes from your definitions of <em>female</em> and <em>male</em>, there's nothing <em>left</em> for the words to attach to but mere statistical tendencies—that is, stereotypes.</p>
<p>Conversely, another classic gender-critical trope is that sex is <em>just</em> about genitals and chromosomes and gamete size. Any "thicker" concept of what it means to be a woman or man is sexist nonsense. With some trepidation, I also don't think that one's going to fly. It's hard to see why most gender-critical feminists would care so much about maintaining single-sex spaces, if sex were strictly a matter of genitals or (especially) chromosomes or gamete size; it would seem that they too want mere statistical tendencies to be part of the concept.</p>
<p>This is somewhat ideologically inconvenient for antisexists like I used to be, insofar as it entails biting the bullet on masculine women and feminine men being in some sense less "real" women and men, respectively. Are our very concepts not then reinforcing an oppressive caste system?</p>
<p>I don't think the situation is quite that bad, as long as the map–territory relationship stays mostly one-directional: the map describing the territory, rather than the territory being bulldozed to suit the map—outliers needing a slightly longer message length to describe, rather than being shot. In my antisexist youth, I don't think I would have wanted to concede even that much, but I couldn't then have explained how that would work mathematically—and I still can't. Let me know if you figure it out.</p>Fake Deeply2023-10-26T12:40:00-07:002023-10-26T12:40:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-10-26:/2023/Oct/fake-deeply/<p>"I want <em>you</em>, Jake," said the woman in the video as she took off her shirt. "Those negative comments on your pull requests were just a smokescreen—because I was afraid to confront the inevitability of our love!"</p>
<p>Jake Morgan still couldn't help but marvel at what he and his …</p><p>"I want <em>you</em>, Jake," said the woman in the video as she took off her shirt. "Those negative comments on your pull requests were just a smokescreen—because I was afraid to confront the inevitability of our love!"</p>
<p>Jake Morgan still couldn't help but marvel at what he and his team had built. It really looked and sounded just like her!</p>
<p>It had been obvious since DALL-E back in 'twenty-one—earlier if you were paying attention—that generative AI would reach this level of customization and realism before too long. Eventually, it was just a matter of the right couple dozen people rolling up their sleeves—and Magma's willingness to pony up the compute—to make it work. But <em>it worked</em>. His awe at Multigen's sheer power would have been humbling, if not for the awareness of his own role in bringing it into being.</p>
<p>Of course, this particular video wouldn't be showcased in the team's next publication. Technically, Magma employees were not supposed to use their cutting-edge generative AI system to make custom pornography of their coworkers. Technically (what was probably a lesser offense) Magma employees were not supposed to be viewing pornography during work hours. Technically—what should have been a greater offense—Magma employees were not supposed to covertly introduce a bug into the generative AI service codebase specifically in order to make it possible to create custom pornography of their coworkers without leaving a log.</p>
<p><span style="float: right; margin: 0.4pc;">
<a href="/images/fake_deeply-jake.png"><img src="/images/fake_deeply-jake-smaller.png" width="450"></a><br/>
<span class="photo-credit" style="float: right;">Illustration made with <a href="https://stability.ai/stable-diffusion">Stable Diffusion XL 1.0</a></span>
</span></p>
<p>But, <em>technically</em>? No one could enforce any of that. Developers needed to test what the system they were building was capable of. The flexibility for employees to be able to take care of the occasional personal task during the day was universally understood (if not always explicitly acknowledged) as a perk of remote-work policies. And everyone writes bugs.</p>
<p>This miracle of computer science was the product of years of hard work by Jake and his colleagues. <em>He</em> had built it (in part), and he had the moral right to enjoy its products—and what Magma's Trust and Safety bureaucracy didn't know, wouldn't hurt anyone. He had <em>already</em> been fantasizing about seeing Elaine naked for months; delegating the cognitive work of visualization to Magma's GPU farm instead of his own visual cortex couldn't make a moral difference, surely.</p>
<p>Elaine, probably, would object, if she knew. But if she didn't know that Jake <em>specifically</em> was using Multigen <em>specifically</em> to generate erotica of her <em>specifically</em>, she must have known that this was an obvious use-case of the technology. If she didn't want people using generative AI to visualize her body in sexually suggestive situations, then <em>why was she working to advance the state of generative AI?</em> Really, she had no one to blame but herself.</p>
<p>Just as he was about to come, he was interrupted by an instant messenger notification. It was from someone named Chloë Lemoine, saying she'd like to discuss an issue in the Multigen codebase at his earliest convenience.</p>
<p><em>Trans or real?</em> Jake wondered, clicking on her profile.</p>
<p>The profile text indicated that Chloë was on the newly formed capability risk evaluations team. Jake groaned. <em>Yuddites.</em> Fears of artificial intelligence destroying humanity had been trending recently. In response, Magma had commissioned a team with the purpose to monitor and audit the company's AI projects for the emergence of unforeseen and potentially dangerous capabilities, although the exact scope of the new team's power was unclear and probably subject to the outcome of future intra-company political battles.</p>
<p>Jake took a dim view of the AI risk crowd. Given what deep learning could do nowadays, it didn't feel quite right to dismiss their doomsday stories as science fiction, exactly, but Jake maintained that it was the <em>wrong subgenre</em> of science fiction. His team was building the computer from <em>Star Trek</em>, not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream">AM</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep">the Blight</a>: tools, not creatures. Despite the brain-inspired name, "neural networks" were ultimately just a technique for fitting a curve to training data. If it was counterintuitive how much you could get done with a curve fitted to <em>the entire internet</em>, previous generations of computing pioneers must have found it equally counterintuitive how much you could get done with millions of arithmetic operations per second. It was a new era of technology, not a new era of life.</p>
<p>It was because of his skepticism rather than in spite of it that he had volunteered to be the Multigen team's designated contact person for the risk evals team (which was no doubt why this Chloë person had messaged him). No one else had volunteered at the meeting when it came up, and Jake had been slightly curious what "capability risk evaluations" would even entail.</p>
<p>Well, now he would find out. He washed his hands and messaged Chloë back, offering to hop on a quick video call.</p>
<p><em>Definitely trans</em>, thought Jake, as Chloë's face appeared on screen.</p>
<p>"I hope I'm not interrupting anything important," she said.</p>
<p>"No, nothing important," he said smoothly. "What was it you wanted to discuss?"</p>
<p>"This commit," she said, pasting a link to Magma's code repository viewer into the call's text chat.</p>
<p>Jake's blood ran cold. The commit message at the link described the associated code change as modifying a regex—a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression">regular expression</a>, a sequence of characters specifying a pattern to search for in text. This one was used for logging requests to the Multigen service; the revised regex would now extract the client's user-agent string as a new metadata field.</p>
<p>That much was true. What the commit message didn't explain, but which a careful review of the code might have noticed as odd, was that the revised regex started with <code>^[^\a]</code>—matching strings that didn't start with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_character">the ASCII bell character 0x07</a>. The bell character was a historical artifact from the early days of computing. No sane request would start with a bell, and so the odd start to the regex would do no harm ... unless, perhaps, some client <em>were</em> to start their request with a bell character, in which case the regex would fail to match and the request would silently fail to be logged.</p>
<p>The commit's author was listed as Code Assistant, an internal Magma AI service that automatically suggested small fixes based on issue descriptions, to be reviewed and approved by human engineers.</p>
<p>That part was mostly true. Code Assistant had created the logging change. Jake had written the bell character backdoor and <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/rewriting-history#git-commit--amend">melded it onto Code Assistant's change</a>, gambling that whichever of his coworkers got around to reviewing Code Assistant's most recent change submissions would rubber-stamp them without noticing the bug. (Who reads regexes that carefully, really?) If they did notice, they would blame Code Assistant. (Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was "thinking"?)</p>
<p>Thus, by carefully prefixing his requests with the bell character, Jake could make all the custom videos he wanted, with no need to worry about explaining himself if someone happened to read the logs. It was the perfect crime—not a crime, really. A precaution.</p>
<p>But now his precaution had been discovered. So much for his career at Magma. But only at Magma—the industry gossip network wouldn't prevent him from landing on his feet elsewhere ... right?</p>
<p>Chloë was explaining the bug. "... and so, if a client were to send a request starting with the ASCII bell character—I know, right?—then the request wouldn't be logged."</p>
<p>"I see," said Jake, his blood thawing. Chloë's tone wasn't accusatory. If she ("she") wasn't here to tell him his career was over, he'd better not let anything on. "Well, thanks for telling me. I'll fix that right after this call." He forced a chuckle. "Language models hallucinate weird things sometimes. Who knows what it was 'thinking'?"</p>
<p>"Exactly!" said Chloë. "<em>Who knows what it was thinking?</em> That's what I wanted to talk to you about!"</p>
<p>"Uh ..." Jake balked. If he hadn't been found out, why <em>was</em> someone from risk evals talking to him about a faulty regex? The smart play would be to disengage as quickly as possible, rather than encourage inquiry about the cause of the bug, but he was intrigued by the possibility that Chloë was implying what he thought she was. "You're not suggesting Code Assistant might have written this bug on purpose?"</p>
<p>She smirked. "And if I am?"</p>
<p>"That's absurd. It's not a person that wants things. It's an autoregressive language model fine-tuned to map ticket descriptions to code changes."</p>
<p>"And humans are just animals evolved to maximize inclusive genetic fitness. If natural selection could hill-climb its way into creating general intelligence, why can't stochastic gradient descent? I don't think it's dignified for humanity to be playing with AI at all given our current level of wisdom, but if it's happening anyway, thanks to the efforts of people like you"—okay, <em>now</em> her tone was accusatory—"it's my heroic responsibility to maintain constant vigilance. To monitor the things we're creating and be ready to sound the fire alarm, if there's anyone sane left to hear it."</p>
<p>Jake shook his head. These Yuddites were even nuttier than he thought. "And your evidence for this is, what? That the model wrote a silly regex once?"</p>
<p>"And that the bug is being exploited."</p>
<p>Jake's blood flash-froze. "Wh—what?"</p>
<p>Chloë pasted two more links into the chat, this time to Magma's log viewer. "Requests go through a reverse proxy before hitting the Multigen service itself. Comparing the two, there are dozens of requests logged by the reverse proxy that don't show up in Multigen's logs—starting just minutes after the bug was deployed. The reverse proxy logs include the client IP, which is inside Magma's VPN, of course"—Multigen wasn't yet a public-facing product—"but don't include the request data or user auth, so I don't know what the client was doing specifically. Which is apparently just what they, or it, wanted."</p>
<p>Jake silently and glumly reviewed the logs. The timestamps were consistent with when he had been requesting videos. He remembered that after one of his coworkers (Elaine, as it turned out) had approved the doctored Code Assistant change, he had eagerly waited for the build automation to deploy the faulty commit so that he could try it out as soon as possible.</p>
<p><em>How did you even find this?</em> he wanted to ask, but that didn't seem like a smart play. Finally, he said, "You really think Code Assistant did this? 'Deliberately' checked in a bug, and then exploited it to secretly request some image or video generations? For some 'reason of its own'?"</p>
<p>"I don't know anything—yet—but look at the facts," said Chloë. "The bug was written by Code Assistant. Immediately after it gets merged and deployed, someone apparently starts exploiting it. How do you think I should explain this?"</p>
<p>For a moment, Jake thought she must be blackmailing him—that she knew his guilt, and the question was her way of subtly offering to play dumb in exchange for his office-political support for anything risk evals might want in the future.</p>
<p>That didn't fit, though. Anyone who could recite Yuddite cant with such conviction (not to mention the whole pretending-to-be-a-woman thing) clearly had the true-believer phenotype. This Chloë meant exactly what she said.</p>
<p>How did he think she should explain this? There was a perfectly ordinary explanation that had nothing to do with Chloë's wrong-kind-of-science-fiction paranoia—and Jake's career depended on her not figuring it out.</p>
<p>"I don't know," he said. He suddenly remembered that staying in this conversation was probably not in his interests. "You know, I actually have another meeting to get to," he lied. "I'll fix that regex today. I don't suppose you need anything else from me—"</p>
<p>"Actually, I'd like to know more about Multigen—and I'll likely have more questions after I talk to the Code Assistant team. Can I pick a time on your calendar next week?" It was Friday.</p>
<p>"Sure. Talk to you then—if we humans are still alive, right?" Jake said, hoping to add a touch of humor, and only realizing in the moment after he said it what a terrible play it was; Chloë was more likely to take it as mockery than find it endearing.</p>
<p>"I hope so," she said solemnly, and hung up.</p>
<p><em>Shit!</em> How could he have been so foolish? It had been a specialist's blindness. He worked on Multigen. He knew that Multigen logged requests, and that people on his team occasionally had reason to search those logs. He didn't want anyone knowing what he was asking Multigen to do. So he had arranged for his requests to not appear in Multigen's logs, thinking that that was enough.</p>
<p><em>Of course</em> it wasn't enough! He hadn't considered that Multigen would sit behind a different server (the reverse proxy) with its own logs. He was a research engineer, not a devops guy; he wrote code, but thinking about how and where the code would actually run had always been someone else's job.</p>
<p>It got worse. When the Multigen web interface supplied the user's requested media, that data had to live somewhere. The <em>videos themselves</em> would still be on Magma's object storage cluster! How could that have seemed like an acceptable risk? Jake struggled to recall what he had been thinking at the time. Had he been too horny to even consider it?</p>
<p>No. It had seemed safe at the time because videos weren't searchable. Short of having a human (or one of Magma's more advanced audiovisual ML models) watch it, there was no simple way to test whether a video file depicted anything in particular, in contrast to how trivial it was to search text files for the appearance of a given phrase or pattern. The videos would be saved in object storage under uninformative file names based on the timestamp and a unique random identifier. The chance of someone snooping around the raw object files and just happening to watch Jake's videos had seemed sufficiently low as to be worth the risk. (Although the chance of someone catching a discrepancy between Multigen's logs and some other unanticipated log would have seemed low before it actually just happened, which cast doubt on his risk assessment skills.)</p>
<p>But now that Chloë was investigating the bell character bug, it was only a matter of time. Comparing a directory listing of the object storage cluster with the timestamps of the missing logs would reveal which files had been generated illicitly.</p>
<p>He had some time. Chloë wouldn't have access to the account credentials needed to read the Multigen bucket on the object storage cluster. In fact, it was likely that she'd ask Jake himself for help with that next week. (He was the Multigen team's designated contact to risk evals, and Chloë, the true believer in malevolent robots, showed no signs of suspecting him. There would be no reason to go behind his back.)</p>
<p>However, Jake did have access to the cluster. He almost laughed in relief. It was obvious what he needed to do. Grab the object storage credentials from Multigen's configuration, get a directory listing of files in the bucket, compare to the missing logs to figure out which files were incriminating, and overwrite the incriminating files with innocuous Multigen-generated videos of puppies or something.</p>
<p>He had only made a couple dozen videos, but the work of covering it up would be the same if he had made thousands; it was a simple scripting job. Code Assistant probably could have done it.</p>
<p>Chloë would be left with the unsolvable mystery of what her digital poltergeist wanted with puppy videos, but Jake was fine with that. (Better than trying to convince her that the rogue AI wanted nudes of female Magma employees.) When she came back to him next week, he would just need to play it cool and answer her questions about the system.</p>
<p>Or maybe—he could read some Yuddite literature over the weekend, feign a sincere interest in 'AI safety', try to get on her good side? Jake had trouble believing that any sane person could really think that Magma's machine learning models were plotting something. This cult victim had ridden a wave of popular hysteria into a sinecure. If he played nice and validated her belief system in the most general terms, maybe that would be enough to make her feel useful and therefore not need to bother chasing shadows in order to justify her position. She would lose interest and this farcical little investigation would blow over.</p>
<hr>
<p>"And so just because an AI seems to behaving well, doesn't mean it's aligned," Chloë was explaining. "If we train AI with human feedback ratings, we're not just selecting for policies that do tasks the way we intended. We're also selecting for policies that <em>trick human evaluators into giving high ratings</em>. In the limit, you'd expect those to dominate. 'Be good' strategies can't compete with 'look good' strategies in a looking-good contest—but in the current paradigm, looking good is the only game in town. We don't know how these systems work in the way that we know how ordinary software works; we only know how to train them."</p>
<p>"So then we're just screwed, right?" said Jake in the tone of an attentive student. They were in a conference room on the Magma campus on Monday. After fixing the logging regex and overwriting the evidence with puppies, he had spent the weekend catching up with the 'AI safety' literature. Honestly, some of it had been better than he expected. Just because Chloë was nuts didn't mean there was nothing intelligent to be said about risks from future systems.</p>
<p>"I mean, probably," said Chloë. She was beaming. Jake's plan to distract her from the investigation by asking her to bring him up to speed on AI safety seemed to be working perfectly.</p>
<p><span style="float: right; margin: 0.4pc;">
<a href="/images/fake_deeply-chloe_and_jake.png"><img src="/images/fake_deeply-chloe_and_jake-smaller.png" width="450"></a><br/>
<span class="photo-credit" style="float: right;">Illustration by <a href="https://stability.ai/stable-diffusion">Stable Diffusion XL 1.0</a></span>
</span></p>
<p>"But not necessarily," she continued. There are a few avenues of hope—at least in the not-wildly-superhuman regime. One of them has to do with the fragility of deception.</p>
<p>"The thing about deception is, you can't just lie about one thing. Everything is connected to each other in the Great Web of Causality. If you lie about one thing, you also have to lie about the evidence pointing to that thing, and the evidence pointing to that evidence, and so on, recursively covering up the coverups. For example ..." she trailed off. "Sorry, I didn't rehearse this; maybe you can think of an example."</p>
<p>Jake's heart stopped. She had to be toying with him, right? Indeed, Jake could think of an example. By his count, he was now three layers deep into his stack of coverups and coverups-of-coverups (by writing the bell character bug, attributing it to Code Assistant, and overwriting the incriminating videos with puppies). Four, if you counted pretending to give a shit about 'AI safety'. But now he was done ... right?</p>
<p>No! Not quite, he realized. He had overwritten the videos, but the object metadata would still show them with a last-modified timestamp of Friday evening (when he had gotten his puppy-overwriting script working), not the timestamp of their actual creation (which Chloë had from the reverse-proxy logs). That wouldn't directly implicate him (the way the videos depicting Elaine calling him by name would), but it would show that whoever had exploited the bell character bug was <em>covering their tracks</em> (as opposed to just wanting puppy videos in the first place).</p>
<p>But the object storage API probably provided a way to edit the metadata and update the last-modified time, right? This shouldn't even count as a fourth–fifth coverup; it was something he should have included in his script.</p>
<p>Was there anything else he was missing? The object storage cluster did have a optional "versioning" feature. When activated for a particular bucket, it would save previous versions of an object rather than overwriting them. He had assumed versioning wasn't on for the bucket that Multigen was using. (It wouldn't make sense; the workflow didn't call for writing the same object name more than once.)</p>
<p>"I think I get the idea," said Jake in his attentive student role. "I'm not seeing how that helps us. Maybe you could explain." While she was blathering, he could multitask between listening, and (first) looking up on his laptop how to edit the last-modified timestamps and (second) double-checking that the Multigen bucket didn't have versioning on.</p>
<p>"Right, so if a model is behaving well according to all of our deepest and most careful evaluations, that could mean it's doing what we want, but it could be elaborately deceiving us," said Chloë. "Both policies would be highly rated. But the training process has to discover these policies continuously, one gradient update at a time. If the spectrum between the 'honest' policy and a successfully deceptive policy consists of less-highly rated policies, maybe gradient descent will stay—or could be made to stay—in the valley of honest policies, and not climb over the hill into the valley of deceptive policies, even though those would ultimately achieve a lower loss."</p>
<p>"Uh huh," Jake said unhappily. The object storage docs made clear that the <code>Last-Modified</code> header was set automatically by the system; there was no provision for users to set it arbitrarily.</p>
<p>"Here's <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/AqsjZwxHNqH64C2b6/let-s-see-you-write-that-corrigibility-tag/comment/8kPhqBc69HtmZj6XR">an example due to Paul</a>," Chloë said. Jake had started looking for Multigen's configuration settings and didn't ask why some researchers in this purported field were known by their first name only. "Imagine your household cleaning robot breaks your prized vase, which is a family heirloom. That's a negative reward. But if the robot breaks the vase and <em>tries to cover it up</em>—secretly cleans up the pieces and deletes the video footage, hoping that you'll assume a burglar took the vase instead—that's going to be an even larger negative reward when the deception is discovered. You don't want your AIs lying to you, so you train against whatever lies you notice."</p>
<p>"Uh <em>huh</em>," Jake said, more unhappily. It turned out that versioning <em>was</em> on for the bucket. (Why? But probably whoever's job it was to set up the bucket had instead asked, Why not?) A basic <code>GET</code> request for the file name would return puppies, but previous revisions of the file were still available for anyone who thought to query for them.</p>
<p>"So if the system is trained to pass rigorous evaluations, a deceptive policy has to do a lot more work, different work, to pass the evaluations," Chloë said. "Maybe it buys a new, similar-looking vase to put in the same place, and forges the payment memo to make it look like the purchase was for cleaning supplies, and so on. The point is, small, 'shallow' deceptions aren't stable. The set of policies that do well on evaluations comes in two disconnected parts: the part that tells the truth, and the part that—not just lies, but, um—"</p>
<p>Jake's attentive student persona finished the thought. "But spins up an entire false reality, as intricate as it needs to be to protect itself. If you're going to fake anything, you need to fake deeply."</p>
<p>"Exactly, you get it!" Chloë was elated. "You know, when I called you last week, I was worried you thought I was nuts. But you see the value of constant vigilance now, right?—why we need to investigate and debug things like this until we understand what's going on, instead of just shrugging that neural nets do weird things sometimes. If the landscape of policies looks something like what I've described, catching the precursors to deception early could be critical—to raise the height of the loss landscape between the honest and deceptive policies, before frontier AI development plunges into the latter. To get good enough at catching lies, for honesty to be the best policy."</p>
<p>"Yeah," Jake said. "I get it."</p>
<p>"Anyway, now that you understand the broader context, I had some questions about Multigen," said Chloë. "How is the generated media stored? I'm hoping it's still possible to see what was generated in the requests that escaped logging."</p>
<p>There it was. Time to stall, if he could. "Um ... I <em>think</em> it goes into the object storage cluster, but I'm not really familiar with that part of the codebase," Jake lied. "Could we set up another meeting after I've looked at the code?"</p>
<p>She smiled. "Sure."</p>
<p>Purging the videos for real wasn't obviously possible given the level of access he currently had, but he had just bought a little bit of time. Could he convince whoever's job it was to turn off versioning for the Multigen bucket, without arousing suspicion? Probably? There had to be other avenues to stall or misdirect Chloë. He'd think of something ...</p>
<p>But it was a little unnerving that he kept <em>having</em> to think of something. Was there something to Chloë's galaxy-brained philosophical ramblings? Was there some sense in which it really was one or the other—a policy of truth, or a policy of lies?</p>
<p>He wasn't scared of the robot apocalypse any time soon. But who could say but that someday—many, many years from now—a machine from a different subgenre of science fiction would weigh decisions not unlike the ones he faced now? He stifled a nervous laugh, which was almost a sob.</p>
<p>"Are you okay?" Chloë asked.</p>
<p>"Well—"</p>Proceduralist Sticker Graffiti2023-10-19T15:25:00-07:002023-10-19T15:25:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-10-19:/2023/Oct/proceduralist-sticker-graffiti/<p>Here's how I know that I <a href="/2023/Sep/start-over/">moved to</a> <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#correct-side-of-the-tunnel">the correct side</a> of the Caldecott Tunnel.</p>
<p>Just outside my door (which has one lock, three fewer than the old apartment—probably some kind of prior being expressed there), the street lamp post has a "CENSORSHIP IS ANTI-SCIENCE" sticker on it.</p>
<p><a href="/images/censorship_is_anti-science_sticker.jpg"><img src="/images/censorship_is_anti-science_sticker.jpg" width="450"></a></p>
<p>A …</p><p>Here's how I know that I <a href="/2023/Sep/start-over/">moved to</a> <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#correct-side-of-the-tunnel">the correct side</a> of the Caldecott Tunnel.</p>
<p>Just outside my door (which has one lock, three fewer than the old apartment—probably some kind of prior being expressed there), the street lamp post has a "CENSORSHIP IS ANTI-SCIENCE" sticker on it.</p>
<p><a href="/images/censorship_is_anti-science_sticker.jpg"><img src="/images/censorship_is_anti-science_sticker.jpg" width="450"></a></p>
<p>A fire hydrant across the street has an "ELECTION INTEGRITY IS A BIPARTISAN ISSUE" sticker.</p>
<p><a href="/images/sticker_hydrant.jpg"><img src="/images/sticker_hydrant.jpg" width="208.3"></a>
<a href="/images/election_integrity_is_a_bitpartisan_issue_sticker.jpg"><img src="/images/election_integrity_is_a_bitpartisan_issue_sticker.jpg" width="450"></a></p>
<p>What's extraordinary about these slogans is how meta they are: advocating for processes that lead to good results, rather than a position to be adopted by such a process. The anti-censorship sticker isn't protesting that some particular message is being suppressed by the powers that be, but rather that suppressing speech is itself contrary to the scientific method, which selects winning ideas by empiricism rather than by force. The election integrity sticker evinces a commitment to the democratic process, implying that voter fraud and voter suppression both undermine the execution of a free and fair election that represents the popular will, whose outcome is legitimate because the process is legitimate.</p>
<p>I should wish to live in a Society where such thoughts are too commonplace to be worth a sticker, rather than so rare that seeing them expressed in stickers should provoke an entire blog post. As things are, I was happy to see the stickers and felt that they were somehow less out-of-place here than they would have been in Berkeley, fifteen miles west in geographical space and a couple years further in political time.</p>
<p>Who put these stickers here? I wish I could meet them, and find out if I'm projecting too much of my own philosophy onto these simple slogans. What would they say, if prompted to describe their politics and given more than six words of bandwidth to reply? Would their bravery have been deterred (as mine probably would) had their target already been defaced by a decal bearing a different tagline, "STICKER GRAFFITI VIOLATES PROPERTY RIGHTS"?</p>
<p><strong>Addendum, 15 December 2023</strong>: I missed these ("FREE SPEECH" inside of a heart), at the foot of the lamp post—</p>
<p><a href="/images/heart_free_speech_stickers.jpg"><img src="/images/heart_free_speech_stickers.jpg" width="550"></a></p>Start Over2023-09-23T21:15:00-07:002023-09-23T21:15:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-09-23:/2023/Sep/start-over/<blockquote>
<p><em>Can we all start over<br>
After the final chapter's end?<br>
When it all starts over<br>
How do these scars begin to mend?</em></p>
<p>—<em>Centaurworld</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I moved apartments the other week, on some philosopher's birthday or the anniversary of a national tragedy, to a nice studio in a nice neighborhood back on …</p><blockquote>
<p><em>Can we all start over<br>
After the final chapter's end?<br>
When it all starts over<br>
How do these scars begin to mend?</em></p>
<p>—<em>Centaurworld</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I moved apartments the other week, on some philosopher's birthday or the anniversary of a national tragedy, to a nice studio in a nice neighborhood back on the correct side of the Caldecott Tunnel (<a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#correct-side-of-the-tunnel">now that I've learned my lesson about</a> which side of the tunnel is correct).</p>
<p>I had been making noises about leaving Berkeley <a href="/2020/Feb/cloud-vision/">for a while</a>, but kept not getting around to it until my hand was forced by my roommate moving out. Insofar as I was complaining about the political culture, you might think that I should have fled the Bay entirely, to a different region which might have different kinds of people. Reno, probably. Or Austin (which may be the Berkeley of Texas, but at least it's the Berkeley <em>of Texas</em>).</p>
<p>I don't think a longer move was necessary. I mostly live on the internet, anyway: insofar as "Berkeley" was a metonym for <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">the egregore</a>, it's unclear how much leaving the literal city would help.</p>
<p>Although—it may not be entirely a coincidence that I feel better having left the literal city? Moving is a Schelling point for new beginnings, new habits. The <a href="/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/">sense</a> <a href="/2022/Apr/backlog-metablogging-april-2022/">that</a> my life is over hasn't fully gone away, but now I have more hope in finding meaning and not just pleasure in this afterlife <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy">while it lasts</a>, perhaps fueled by regret-based superpowers.</p>
<p>I'm happy. I have a lot of writing to do.</p>
<hr>
<p>In my old neighborhood in the part of Berkeley that's secretly Oakland (the city limits forming a penninsula just around my apartment), there used to be a "free store" on the corner—shelves for people to leave unwanted consumer goods and to take them to a good home. It stopped being a thing shortly before I left, due to some combination of adverse attention from city municipal code inspectors, <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/07/21/south-berkeley-free-store-destroyed-by-fire">and a fire</a>.</p>
<p>In memoriam, there was a butcher-paper sign on the fence with a pen on a string, asking community members to write a note on what the free store had meant to them.</p>
<p>One of the messages read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>i'm a (very broke) trans woman<br>
and i don't often feel great about<br>
my body, but there are a few items<br>
that i found here that fit me in a way<br>
thats very affirming to me</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are so many questions (of the rhetorical or probing varieties) I could ask of my neighbor who wrote that message. (<a href="/2021/Mar/point-man/">Why mention</a> being trans at all? Don't many cis women often not feel great about their bodies? What do you think are the differences between you and a man who might have written a message starting "I'm a (very broke) transvestite"? Or is it just that such a man's sense of public decency would bid him keep quiet ... or, just possibly, write a message more like yours?)</p>
<p>But—not my neighbor.</p>
<p>I don't live there anymore.</p>A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning2023-07-15T10:50:00-07:002023-07-15T10:50:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-07-15:/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/<blockquote>
<p>If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.</p>
<p>—Zora Neale Hurston</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"</a>, I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty …</p><blockquote>
<p>If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.</p>
<p>—Zora Neale Hurston</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"</a>, I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive sexual fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and also thought it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I got set straight by these really great Sequences of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, which taught me (incidentally, among many other things) <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">how absurdly unrealistic my obsessive sexual fantasy was given merely human-level technology</a>, and that it's actually <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality">immoral <em>not</em> to believe</a> in psychological sex differences <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/litany-of-tarski">given that</a> psychological sex differences are actually real. In a subsequent post, <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/">"Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer"</a>, I told the part about how, in 2016, everyone in my systematically-correct-reasoning community up to and including Eliezer Yudkowsky suddenly started claiming that guys like me might actually be women in some unspecified metaphysical sense and insisted on playing dumb when confronted with alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena, until I eventually had a sleep-deprivation- and stress-induced delusional nervous breakdown.</p>
<p>That's not the egregious part of the story. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how obvious I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility">not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but actually wrong in the real world</a>. If my fellow rationalists merely weren't sold on the thesis about autogynephilia as a cause of transsexuality, I would be disappointed, but it wouldn't be grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud. And indeed, I <em>did</em> <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">end up moderating my views</a> compared to the extent to which my thinking in 2016–7 took the views of Ray Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Anne Lawrence as received truth. (At the same time, I don't particularly regret saying what I said in 2016–7, because Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is still obviously <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/"><em>directionally</em> correct</a> compared to the nonsense everyone else was telling me.)</p>
<p>But a striking pattern in my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy in late 2016 and early 2017 was the tendency for the conversation to get derailed on some variation of, "Well, the word <em>woman</em> doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"</a>, a November 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply <em>defining</em> trans people as their preferred gender to alleviate their dysphoria.</p>
<p>After Yudkowsky had stepped away from full-time writing, Alexander had emerged as our subculture's preeminent writer. Most people in an intellectual scene "are writers" in some sense, but Alexander was the one "everyone" reads: you could often reference a <em>Slate Star Codex</em> post in conversation and expect people to be familiar with the idea, either from having read it, or by osmosis. The frequency with which "... Not Man for the Categories" was cited at me seemed to suggest it had become our subculture's party line on trans issues.</p>
<p>But the post is wrong in obvious ways. To be clear, it's true that categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—categories are "map", not "territory"—and it's possible that trans women might be women with respect to some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, Alexander goes much further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories <em>to make trans people feel better</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is wrong because categories exist in our model of the world <em>in order to</em> capture empirical regularities in the world itself: the map is supposed to <em>reflect</em> the territory, and there <em>are</em> "rules of rationality" governing what kinds of word and category usages correspond to correct probabilistic inferences. Yudkowsky had written a whole Sequence about this, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb">"A Human's Guide to Words"</a>. Alexander cites <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside">a post</a> from that Sequence in support of the (true) point about how categories are "in the map" ... but if you actually read the Sequence, another point that Yudkowsky pounds home over and over, is that word and category definitions are nevertheless <em>not</em> arbitrary: you can't define a word any way you want, because there are <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">at least 37 ways that words can be wrong</a>—principles that make some definitions perform better than others as "cognitive technology."</p>
<p>In the case of Alexander's bogus argument about gender categories, the relevant principle (<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">#30</a> on <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">the list of 37</a>) is that if you group things together in your map that aren't actually similar in the territory, you're going to make bad inferences.</p>
<p>Crucially, this is a general point about how language itself works that has <em>nothing to do with gender</em>. No matter what you believe about controversial empirical questions, intellectually honest people should be able to agree that "I ought to accept an unexpected [<em>X</em>] or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered [<em>Y</em>] if [positive consequence]" is not the correct philosophy of language, <em>independently of the particular values of X and Y</em>.</p>
<p>This wasn't even what I was trying to talk to people about. <em>I</em> thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an empirical theory of psychology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males, the truth or falsity of which cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. But at this point, I still trusted people in my robot cult to be basically intellectually honest, rather than slaves to their political incentives, so I endeavored to respond to the category-boundary argument under the assumption that it was an intellectually serious argument that someone could honestly be confused about.</p>
<p>When I took a year off from dayjobbing from March 2017 to March 2018 to have more time to study and work on this blog, the capstone of my sabbatical was an exhaustive response to Alexander, <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"</a> (which Alexander <a href="https://archive.ph/irpfd#selection-1625.53-1629.55">graciously included in his next links post</a>). A few months later, I followed it with <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">"Reply to <em>The Unit of Caring</em> on Adult Human Females"</a>, responding to a similar argument from soon-to-be <em>Vox</em> journalist Kelsey Piper, then writing as <em>The Unit of Caring</em> on Tumblr.</p>
<p>I'm proud of those posts. I think Alexander's and Piper's arguments were incredibly dumb, and that with a lot of effort, I did a pretty good job of explaining why to anyone who was interested and didn't, at some level, prefer not to understand.</p>
<p>Of course, a pretty good job of explaining by one niche blogger wasn't going to put much of a dent in the culture, which is the sum of everyone's blogposts; despite the mild boost from the <em>Slate Star Codex</em> links post, my megaphone just wasn't very big. I was disappointed with the limited impact of my work, but not to the point of bearing much hostility to "the community." People had made their arguments, and I had made mine; I didn't think I was entitled to anything more than that.</p>
<p>Really, that should have been the end of the story. Not much of a story at all. If I hadn't been further provoked, I would have still kept up this blog, and I still would have ended up arguing about gender with people sometimes, but this personal obsession wouldn't have been the occasion of a robot-cult religious civil war involving other people whom you'd expect to have much more important things to do with their time.</p>
<p>The <em>casus belli</em> for the religious civil war happened on 28 November 2018. I was at my new dayjob's company offsite event in Austin, Texas. Coincidentally, I had already spent much of the previous two days (since just before the plane to Austin took off) arguing trans issues with other "rationalists" on Discord.</p>
<p>Just that month, I had started a Twitter account using my real name, inspired in an odd way by the suffocating <a href="/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/">wokeness of the Rust open-source software scene</a> where I <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits?author=zackmdavis">occasionally contributed diagnostics patches to the compiler</a>. My secret plan/fantasy was to get more famous and established in the Rust world (one of compiler team membership, or conference talk accepted, preferably both), get some corresponding Twitter followers, and <em>then</em> bust out the @BlanchardPhd retweets and links to this blog. In the median case, absolutely nothing would happen (probably because I failed at being famous), but I saw an interesting tail of scenarios in which I'd get to be a test case in <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/05/how-we-may-mesh/">the Code of Conduct wars</a>.</p>
<p>So, now having a Twitter account, I was browsing Twitter in the bedroom at the rental house for the dayjob retreat when I happened to come across <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521">this thread by @ESYudkowsky</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some people I usually respect for their willingness to publicly die on a hill of facts, now seem to be talking as if pronouns are facts, or as if who uses what bathroom is necessarily a factual statement about chromosomes. Come on, you know the distinction better than that!</p>
<p><em>Even if</em> somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act.</p>
<p>In saying this, I am not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies. I am making a stand on a hill of meaning in defense of validity, about the distinction between what is and isn't a stand on a hill of facts in defense of truth.</p>
<p>I will never stand against those who stand against lies. But changing your name, asking people to address you by a different pronoun, and getting sex reassignment surgery, Is. Not. Lying. You are <em>ontologically</em> confused if you think those acts are false assertions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some of the replies tried to explain the obvious problem—and <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243">Yudkowsky kept refusing to understand</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Using language in a way <em>you</em> dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (chromosomes?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret.</p>
<p>Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>—<a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">repeatedly</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You're mistaken about what the word means to you, I demonstrate thus: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome</a></p>
<p>But even ignoring that, you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dear reader, this is the moment where I <em>flipped out</em>. Let me explain.</p>
<p>This "hill of meaning in defense of validity" proclamation was such a striking contrast to the Eliezer Yudkowsky I remembered—the Eliezer Yudkowsky I had variously described as having "taught me everything I know" and "rewritten my personality over the internet"—who didn't hesitate to criticize uses of language that he thought were failing to "carve reality at the joints", even going so far as to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">call them "wrong"</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[S]aying "There's no way my choice of X can be 'wrong'" is nearly always an error in practice, whatever the theory. You can always be wrong. Even when it's theoretically impossible to be wrong, you can still be wrong. There is never a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for anything you do. That's life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">Similarly</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Once upon a time it was thought that the word "fish" included dolphins. Now you could play the oh-so-clever arguer, and say, "The list: {Salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, trout} is just a list—you can't say that a list is <em>wrong</em>. I can prove in set theory that this list exists. So my definition of <em>fish</em>, which is simply this extensional list, cannot possibly be 'wrong' as you claim."</p>
<p>Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list.</p>
<p>You come up with a list of things that feel similar, and take a guess at why this is so. But when you finally discover what they really have in common, it may turn out that your guess was wrong. It may even turn out that your list was wrong.</p>
<p>You cannot hide behind a comforting shield of correct-by-definition. Both extensional definitions and intensional definitions can be wrong, can fail to carve reality at the joints.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One could argue that this "Words can be wrong when your definition draws a boundary around things that don't really belong together" moral didn't apply to Yudkowsky's new Tweets, which only mentioned pronouns and bathroom policies, not the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions">extensions</a> of common nouns.</p>
<p>But this seems pretty unsatisfying in the context of Yudkowsky's claim to <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032">"not [be] taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies"</a>. One of the Tweets that had recently led to radical feminist Meghan Murphy getting <a href="https://archive.ph/RSVDp">kicked off the platform</a> read simply, <a href="https://archive.is/ppV86">"Men aren't women tho."</a> This doesn't seem like a policy claim; rather, Murphy was using common language to express the fact-claim that members of the natural category of adult human males, are not, in fact, members of the natural category of adult human females.</p>
<p>Thus, if the extension of common words like "woman" and "man" is an issue of epistemic importance that rationalists should care about, then presumably so was Twitter's anti-misgendering policy—and if it <em>isn't</em> (because you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning) then I wasn't sure what was left of the "Human's Guide to Words" Sequence if the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">37-part grand moral</a> needed to be retracted.</p>
<p>I think I <em>am</em> standing in defense of truth when I have an argument for <em>why</em> my preferred word usage does a better job at carving reality at the joints, and the one bringing my usage explicitly into question does not. As such, I didn't see the practical difference between "you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning," and "I can define a word any way I want." About which, again, an earlier Eliezer Yudkowsky had written:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences">"It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions">"So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions">"When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels">"There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression">"And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences">"Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations">"And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words">"And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes">"I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace">"One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to [the] effect [...] [that the definition] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>One could argue that I was unfairly interpreting Yudkowsky's Tweets as having a broader scope than was intended—that Yudkowsky <em>only</em> meant to slap down the false claim that using <em>he</em> for someone with a Y chromosome is "lying", without intending any broader implications about trans issues or the philosophy of language. It wouldn't be realistic or fair to expect every public figure to host an exhaustive debate on all related issues every time they encounter a fallacy they want to Tweet about.</p>
<p>However, I don't think this "narrow" reading is the most natural one. Yudkowsky had previously written of what he called <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/">the fourth virtue of evenness</a>: "If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." He had likewise written <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence">on reversed stupidity</a> (bolding mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates</strong>. Arguing against weaker advocates proves <em>nothing</em>, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Relatedly, Scott Alexander had written about how <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/">"weak men are superweapons"</a>: speakers often selectively draw attention to the worst arguments in favor of a position in an attempt to socially discredit people who have better arguments (which the speaker ignores). In the same way, by just slapping down a weak man from the "anti-trans" political coalition without saying anything else in a similarly prominent location, Yudkowsky was liable to mislead his faithful students into thinking that there were no better arguments from the "anti-trans" side.</p>
<p>To be sure, it imposes a cost on speakers to not be able to Tweet about one specific annoying fallacy and then move on with their lives without the need for <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html">endless disclaimers</a> about related but stronger arguments that they're not addressing. But the fact that <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067185907843756032">Yudkowsky disclaimed that</a> he wasn't taking a stand for or against Twitter's anti-misgendering policy demonstrates that he <em>didn't</em> have an aversion to spending a few extra words to prevent the most common misunderstandings.</p>
<p>Given that, it's hard to read the Tweets Yudkowsky published as anything other than an attempt to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. It's just not plausible that Yudkowsky was simultaneously savvy enough to choose to make these particular points while also being naïve enough to not understand the political context. Deeper in the thread, <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096">he wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sure, <em>in the limit of arbitrarily advanced technology</em>, everyone could be exactly where they wanted to be in sexpsace. Having said this, we have <em>not</em> said all the facts relevant to decisionmaking in our world, where <em>we do not have arbitrarily advanced technology</em> (as Yudkowsky well knew, having <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">written a post about how technically infeasible an actual sex change would be</a>). As Yudkowsky <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067488844122021888">acknowledged in the previous Tweet</a>, "Hormone therapy changes some things and leaves others constant." The existence of hormone replacement therapy does not itself take us into the glorious transhumanist future where everyone is the sex they say they are.</p>
<p>The reason for sex-segregated sports leagues is that sport-relevant multivariate trait distributions of female bodies and male bodies are different: men are taller, stronger, and faster. If you just had one integrated league, females wouldn't be competitive (in the vast majority of sports, with a few exceptions <a href="https://www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/news/why-women-have-beaten-men-in-marathon-swimming/">like ultra-distance swimming</a> that happen to sample an unusually female-favorable corner of sportspace).</p>
<p>Given the empirical reality of the different trait distributions, "Who are the best athletes <em>among females</em>?" is a natural question for people to be interested in and want separate sports leagues to determine. Including male people in female sports leagues undermines the point of having a separate female league, and <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3">hormone replacement therapy after puberty</a> <a href="https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865">doesn't substantially change the picture here</a>.<sup id="fnref:auto-race-analogy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:auto-race-analogy">1</a></sup></p>
<p>Yudkowsky's suggestion that an ignorant commitment to an "Aristotelian binary" is the main reason someone might care about the integrity of women's sports is an absurd strawman. This just isn't something any scientifically literate person would write if they had actually thought about the issue at all, as opposed to having first decided (consciously or not) to bolster their reputation among progressives by dunking on transphobes on Twitter, and then wielding their philosophy knowledge in the service of that political goal. The relevant facts are not subtle, even if most people don't have the fancy vocabulary to talk about them in terms of "multivariate trait distributions."</p>
<p>I'm picking on the "sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary" remark because sports is a case where the relevant effect sizes are so large as to make the point <a href="/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/">hard for all but the most ardent gender-identity partisans to deny</a>. (For example, what the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> ≈ <a href="/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf">2.6 effect size difference in muscle mass</a> means is that a woman as strong as the average man is at the 99.5th percentile for women.) But the point is general: biological sex exists and is sometimes decision-relevant. People who want to be able to talk about sex and make policy decisions on the basis of sex are not making an ontology error, because the ontology in which sex "actually" "exists" continues to make very good predictions in our current tech regime (if not the glorious transhumanist future). It would be a ridiculous <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/">isolated demand for rigor</a> to expect someone to pass a graduate exam about the philosophy and cognitive science of categorization before they can talk about sex.</p>
<p>Thus, Yudkowsky's claim to merely have been standing up for the distinction between facts and policy questions doesn't seem credible. It is, of course, true that pronoun and bathroom conventions are policy decisions rather than matters of fact, but it's bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of contemporary trans-rights debates. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists know that trans-rights advocates aren't falsely claiming that trans women have XX chromosomes! If you <em>just</em> wanted to point out that the rules of sports leagues are a policy question rather than a fact (as if anyone had doubted this), why would you throw in the "Aristotelian binary" weak man and belittle the matter as "humorous"? There are a lot of issues I don't care much about, but I don't see anything funny about the fact that other people <em>do</em> care.<sup id="fnref:sports-case-is-funny"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:sports-case-is-funny">2</a></sup></p>
<p>If any concrete negative consequence of gender self-identity categories is going to be waved away with, "Oh, but that's a mere policy decision that can be dealt with on some basis other than gender, and therefore doesn't count as an objection to the new definition of gender words", then it's not clear what the new definition is <em>for</em>.</p>
<p>Like many gender-dysphoric males, I <a href="/2016/Dec/joined/">cosplay</a> <a href="/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/">female</a> <a href="/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/">characters</a> <a href="/2022/Dec/context-is-for-queens/">at</a> fandom conventions sometimes. And, unfortunately, like many gender-dysphoric males, I'm not very good at it. I think someone looking at some of my cosplay photos and trying to describe their content in clear language—not trying to be nice to anyone or make a point, but just trying to use language as a map that reflects the territory—would say something like, "This is a photo of a man and he's wearing a dress." The word <em>man</em> in that sentence is expressing cognitive work: it's a summary of the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence">lawful cause-and-effect evidential entanglement</a> whereby the photons reflecting off the photograph are correlated with photons reflecting off my body at the time the photo was taken, which are correlated with my externally observable secondary sex characteristics (facial structure, beard shadow, <em>&c.</em>). From this evidence, an agent using an <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes">efficient naïve-Bayes-like model</a> can assign me to its "man" (adult human male) category and thereby make probabilistic predictions about traits that aren't directly observable from the photo. The agent would achieve a better <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/">score on those predictions</a> than if it had assigned me to its "woman" (adult human female) category.</p>
<p>By "traits" I mean not just sex chromosomes (<a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067291243728650243">as Yudkowsky suggested on Twitter</a>), but the conjunction of dozens or hundreds of measurements that are <a href="/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/">causally downstream of sex chromosomes</a>: reproductive organs and muscle mass (again, sex difference effect size of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size#Cohen's_d">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> ≈ 2.6) and Big Five Agreeableness (<em>d</em> ≈ 0.5) and Big Five Neuroticism (<em>d</em> ≈ 0.4) and short-term memory (<em>d</em> ≈ 0.2, favoring women) and white-gray-matter ratios in the brain and probable socialization history and <a href="/papers/archer-the_reality_and_evolutionary_significance_of_human_psychological_sex_differences.pdf">any number of other things</a>—including differences we might not know about, but have prior reasons to suspect exist. No one <em>knew</em> about sex chromosomes before 1905, but given the systematic differences between women and men, it would have been reasonable to suspect the existence of some sort of molecular mechanism of sex determination.</p>
<p>Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in a sentence about my cosplay photos depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to <em>lie</em>, exactly. It's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning," what <em>trans women</em> are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example. But it <em>is</em> forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">cluster in configuration space</a>), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure. ("Trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster.) Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is ignoring the interesting part of the problem. Gender identity's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable">claim to be non-disprovable</a> functions as a way to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points">avoid the belief's real weak points</a>.</p>
<p>To this, one might reply that I'm giving too much credit to the "anti-trans" faction for how stupid they're not being: that <em>my</em> careful dissection of the hidden probabilistic inferences implied by words <a href="/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/">(including pronoun choices)</a> is all well and good, but calling pronouns "lies" is not something you do when you know how to use words.</p>
<p>But I'm <em>not</em> giving them credit for for understanding the lessons of "A Human's Guide to Words"; I just think there's a useful sense of "know how to use words" that embodies a lower standard of philosophical rigor. If a person-in-the-street says of my cosplay photos, "That's a man! I have eyes, and I can see that that's a man! Men aren't women!"—well, I probably wouldn't want to invite them to a <em>Less Wrong</em> meetup. But I do think the person-in-the-street is performing useful cognitive work. Because <em>I</em> have the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition-sight (thanks to Yudkowsky's writings back in the 'aughts), <em>I</em> know how to sketch out the reduction of "Men aren't women" to something more like "This <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms">cognitive algorithm</a> detects secondary sex characteristics and uses it as a classifier for a binary female/male 'sex' category, which it uses to make predictions about not-yet-observed features ..."</p>
<p>But having <em>done</em> the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street <em>has a point</em> that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills?</p>
<p>I bring up my bad cosplay photos as an edge case that helps illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome">complete androgen insensitivity syndrome</a> to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. To differentiate what I'm saying from blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street <em>would</em> be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaire_White">Blaire White</a>. That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language, and ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone. But to find what that better way is, we need to be able to talk about these kinds of details in public, and the attitude evinced in Yudkowsky's Tweets seemed to function as a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FWMfQKG3RpZx6irjm/semantic-stopsigns">semantic stopsign</a> to get people to stop talking about the details.</p>
<p>If you were interested in having a real discussion (instead of a fake discussion that makes you look good to progressives), why would you slap down the "But, but, chromosomes" fallacy and then not engage with the obvious steelman of "But, but, clusters in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1">high-dimensional</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">configuration space</a> that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">aren't actually changeable with contemporary technology</a>" steelman <a href="https://twitter.com/EnyeWord/status/1068983389716385792">which was, in fact, brought up in the replies</a>?</p>
<p>Satire is a weak form of argument: the one who wishes to doubt will always be able to find some aspect in which an obviously absurd satirical situation differs from the real-world situation being satirized and claim that that difference destroys the relevance of the joke. But on the off chance that it might help illustrate the objection, imagine you lived in a so-called "rationalist" subculture where conversations like this happened—</p>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<div class="dialogue">
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Look at this <a href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/cute-corgi-in-front-of-a-laptop-5122188/">adorable cat picture</a>!</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Um, that looks like a dog to me, actually.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048">You're not standing in defense of truth</a> if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067294823000887297">Now, maybe as a matter of policy,</a> you want to make a case for language being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then.</p>
</div>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<p>If you were Alice, and a <em>solid supermajority</em> of your incredibly smart, incredibly philosophically sophisticated friend group <em>including Eliezer Yudkowsky</em> (!!!) seemed to behave like Bob, that would be a worrying sign about your friends' ability to accomplish intellectually hard things like AI alignment, right? Even if there isn't any pressing practical need to discriminate between dogs and cats, the <em>problem</em> is that Bob is <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/">selectively</a> using his sophisticated philosophy-of-language knowledge to try to undermine Alice's ability to use language to make sense of the world, even though Bob obviously knows very well what Alice was trying to say. It's incredibly obfuscatory in a way that people—the <em>same</em> people—would not tolerate in almost <em>any</em> other context.</p>
<p>Imagine an Islamic theocracy in which one Megan Murfi (ميغان ميرفي) had recently gotten kicked off the dominant microblogging platform for speaking disrespectfully about the prophet Muhammad. Suppose that <a href="/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/">Yudkowsky's analogue in that world</a> then posted that those objecting on free inquiry grounds were ontologically confused: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_honorifics#Applied_to_Muhammad_and_his_family">saying "peace be upon him" after the name of the prophet Muhammad</a> is a <em>speech act</em>, not a statement of fact. In banning Murfi for repeatedly speaking about the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) as if he were just some guy, the platform was merely <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067302082481274880">"enforcing a courtesy standard"</a> (in the words of our world's Yudkowsky). Murfi wasn't being forced to <em>lie</em>.</p>
<p>I think the atheists of our world, including Yudkowsky, would not have trouble seeing the problem with this scenario, nor hesitate to agree that it <em>is</em> a problem for that Society's rationality. Saying "peace be unto him" is indeed a speech act rather than a statement of fact, but it would be bizarre to condescendingly point this out as if it were the crux of debates about religious speech codes. The <em>function</em> of the speech act is to signal the speaker's affirmation of Muhammad's divinity. That's why the Islamic theocrats want to mandate that everyone say it: it's a lot harder for atheism to get any traction if no one is allowed to <em>talk</em> like an atheist.</p>
<p>And that's why trans advocates want to mandate against misgendering people on social media: it's harder for trans-exclusionary ideologies to get any traction if no one is allowed to <em>talk</em> like someone who believes that sex (sometimes) matters and gender identity does not.</p>
<p>Of course, such speech restrictions aren't necessarily "irrational", depending on your goals. If you just don't think "free speech" should go that far—if you <em>want</em> to suppress atheism or gender-critical feminism with an iron fist—speech codes are a perfectly fine way to do it! And to their credit, I think most theocrats and trans advocates are intellectually honest about what they're doing: atheists or transphobes are <em>bad people</em> (the argument goes) and we want to make it harder for them to spread their lies or their hate.</p>
<p>In contrast, by claiming to be "not taking a stand for or against any Twitter policies" while accusing people who opposed the policy of being ontologically confused, Yudkowsky was being less honest than the theocrat or the activist: of <em>course</em> the point of speech codes is to suppress ideas! Given that the distinction between facts and policies is so obviously <em>not anyone's crux</em>—the smarter people in the "anti-trans" faction already know that, and the dumber people in the faction wouldn't change their alignment if they were taught—it's hard to see what the <em>point</em> of harping on the fact/policy distinction would be, except to be seen as implicitly taking a stand for the "pro-trans" faction while <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jeyvzALDbjdjjv5RW/pretending-to-be-wise">putting on a show of being politically "neutral."</a></p>
<p>It makes sense that Yudkowsky might perceive political constraints on what he might want to say in public—especially when you look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_rights">what happened to the <em>other</em> Harry Potter author</a>.<sup id="fnref:pseudonymous-then"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:pseudonymous-then">3</a></sup> But if Yudkowsky didn't want to get into a distracting fight about a politically-charged topic, then maybe the responsible thing to do would have been to just not say anything about the topic, rather than engaging with the <em>stupid</em> version of the opposition and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters">stonewalling</a> with "That's a policy question" when people tried to point out the problem?!</p>
<hr>
<p>I didn't have all of that criticism collected and carefully written up on 28 November 2018. But that, basically, is why I flipped out when I saw that Twitter thread. If the "rationalists" didn't <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R3ATEWWmBhMhbY2AL/that-magical-click">click</a> on the autogynephilia thing, that was disappointing, but forgivable. If the "rationalists", on Scott Alexander's authority, were furthermore going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this, that was—I don't want to say <em>forgivable</em> exactly, but it was tolerable. I had learned from my misadventures the previous year that I had been wrong to trust "the community" as a reified collective. That had never been a reasonable mental stance in the first place.</p>
<p>But trusting Eliezer Yudkowsky—whose writings, more than any other single influence, had made me who I am—<em>did</em> seem reasonable. If I put him on a pedestal, it was because he had earned the pedestal, for supplying me with my criteria for how to think—including, as a trivial special case, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC3ArwKM8xhNjYqQK/on-things-that-are-awesome">how to think about what things to put on pedestals</a>.</p>
<p>So if the rationalists were going to get our own philosophy of language wrong over this <em>and Eliezer Yudkowsky was in on it</em> (!!!), that was intolerable, inexplicable, incomprehensible—like there <em>wasn't a real world anymore</em>.</p>
<p>At the dayjob retreat, I remember going downstairs to impulsively confide in a senior engineer, an older bald guy who exuded masculinity, who you could tell by his entire manner and being was not infected by the Berkeley mind-virus, no matter how loyally he voted Democrat. I briefly explained the situation to him—not just the immediate impetus of this Twitter thread, but this whole <em>thing</em> of the past couple years where my entire social circle just suddenly decided that guys like me could be women by means of saying so. He was noncommittally sympathetic; he told me an anecdote about him accepting a trans person's correction of his pronoun usage, with the thought that different people have their own beliefs, and that's OK.</p>
<p>If Yudkowsky was already stonewalling his Twitter followers, entering the thread myself didn't seem likely to help. (Also, less importantly, I hadn't intended to talk about gender on that account yet.)</p>
<p>It seemed better to try to clear this up in private. I still had Yudkowsky's email address, last used when <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price">I had offered to pay to talk about his theory of MtF two years before</a>. I felt bad bidding for his attention over my gender thing again—but I had to do <em>something</em>. Hands trembling, I sent him an email asking him to read my <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"</a>, suggesting that it might qualify as an answer to <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067482047126495232">his question about "a page [he] could read to find a non-confused exclamation of how there's scientific truth at stake"</a>. I said that because I cared very much about correcting confusions in my rationalist subculture, I would be happy to pay up to $1000 for his time—and that, if he liked the post, he might consider Tweeting a link—and that I was cc'ing my friends Anna Salamon and Michael Vassar as character references (Subject: "another offer, $1000 to read a ~6500 word blog post about (was: Re: Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation)"). Then I texted Anna and Michael, begging them to vouch for my credibility.</p>
<p>The monetary offer, admittedly, was awkward: I included another paragraph clarifying that any payment was only to get his attention, not <em>quid quo pro</em> advertising, and that if he <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K9ZaZXDnL3SEmYZqB/ends-don-t-justify-means-among-humans">didn't trust his brain circuitry</a> not to be corrupted by money, then he might want to reject the offer on those grounds and only read the post if he expected it to be genuinely interesting.</p>
<p>Again, I realize this must seem weird and cultish to any normal people reading this. (Paying some blogger you follow one grand just to <em>read</em> one of your posts? What? Why? Who <em>does</em> that?) To this, I again refer to <a href="/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#cheerful-price-reasons">the reasons justifying my 2016 cheerful price offer</a>—and that, along with tagging in Anna and Michael, whom I thought Yudkowsky respected, it was a way to signal that I <em>really didn't want to be ignored</em>, which I assumed was the default outcome. An ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere <em>worm</em> in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. I wouldn't have had the audacity to contact him at all, about anything, if I didn't have <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect">Something to Protect</a>.</p>
<p>Anna didn't reply, but I apparently did interest Michael, who chimed in on the email thread to Yudkowsky. We had a long phone conversation the next day lamenting how the "rationalists" were dead as an intellectual community.</p>
<p>As for the attempt to intervene on Yudkowsky—here I need to make a digression about the constraints I'm facing in telling this Whole Dumb Story. <em>I</em> would prefer to just tell this Whole Dumb Story as I would to my long-neglected Diary—trying my best at the difficult task of explaining what actually happened during an important part of my life, without thought of concealing anything.</p>
<p>(If you are silent about your pain, <em>they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it</em>.)</p>
<p><a id="privacy-constraints"></a>Unfortunately, a lot of other people seem to have strong intuitions about "privacy", which bizarrely impose constraints on what <em>I'm</em> allowed to say about my own life: in particular, it's considered unacceptable to publicly quote or summarize someone's emails from a conversation that they had reason to expect to be private. I feel obligated to comply with these widely-held privacy norms, even if <em>I</em> think they're paranoid and <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blackmailers-are-privateers-in-the-war-on-hypocrisy/">anti-social</a>. (This secrecy-hating trait probably correlates with the autogynephilia blogging; someone otherwise like me who believed in privacy wouldn't be telling you this Whole Dumb Story.)</p>
<p>So I would <em>think</em> that while telling this Whole Dumb Story, I obviously have an inalienable right to blog about <em>my own</em> actions, but I'm not allowed to directly refer to private conversations with named individuals in cases where I don't think I'd be able to get the consent of the other party. (I don't think I'm required to go through the ritual of asking for consent in cases where the revealed information couldn't reasonably be considered "sensitive", or if I know the person doesn't have hangups about this weird "privacy" thing.) In this case, I'm allowed to talk about emailing Yudkowsky (because that was <em>my</em> action), but I'm not allowed to talk about anything he might have said in reply, or whether he did.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there's a potentially serious loophole in the commonsense rule: what if some of my actions (which I would have hoped to have an inalienable right to blog about) <em>depend on</em> content from private conversations? You can't, in general, only reveal one side of a conversation.</p>
<p>Suppose Carol messages Dave at 5 <em>p.m.</em>, "Can you come to the party?", and also, separately, that Carol messages Dave at 6 <em>p.m.</em>, "Gout isn't contagious." Should Carol be allowed to blog about the messages she sent at 5 <em>p.m.</em> and 6 <em>p.m.</em>, because she's only describing her own messages and not confirming or denying whether Dave replied at all, let alone quoting him?</p>
<p>I think commonsense privacy-norm-adherence intuitions actually say <em>No</em> here: the text of Carol's messages makes it too easy to guess that sometime between 5 and 6, Dave probably said that he couldn't come to the party because he has gout. It would seem that Carol's right to talk about her own actions in her own life <em>does</em> need to take into account some commonsense judgement of whether that leaks "sensitive" information about Dave.</p>
<p>In the substory (of my Whole Dumb Story) that follows, I'm going to describe several times that I and others emailed Yudkowsky to argue with what he said in public, without saying anything about whether Yudkowsky replied or what he might have said if he did reply. I maintain that I'm within my rights here, because I think commonsense judgment will agree that me talking about the arguments <em>I</em> made does not leak any sensitive information about the other side of a conversation that may or may not have happened. I think the story comes off relevantly the same whether Yudkowsky didn't reply at all (<em>e.g.</em>, because he was too busy with more existentially important things to check his email), or whether he replied in a way that I found sufficiently unsatisfying as to occasion the further emails with followup arguments that I describe. (Talking about later emails <em>does</em> rule out the possible world where Yudkowsky had said, "Please stop emailing me," because I would have respected that, but the fact that he didn't say that isn't "sensitive".)</p>
<p>It seems particularly important to lay out these judgments about privacy norms in connection to my attempts to contact Yudkowsky, because part of what I'm trying to accomplish in telling this Whole Dumb Story is to deal reputational damage to Yudkowsky, which I claim is deserved. (We want reputations to track reality. If you see Erin exhibiting a pattern of intellectual dishonesty, and she keeps doing it even after you talk to her about it privately, you might want to write a blog post describing the pattern in detail—not to <em>hurt</em> Erin, particularly, but so that everyone else can make higher-quality decisions about whether they should believe the things that Erin says.) Given that motivation of mine, it seems important that I only try to hang Yudkowsky with the rope of what he said in public, where you can click the links and read the context for yourself: I'm attacking him, but not betraying him. In the substory that follows, I also describe correspondence with Scott Alexander, but that doesn't seem sensitive in the same way, because I'm not particularly trying to deal reputational damage to Alexander. (Not because Scott performed well, but because one wouldn't really have expected him to in this situation; Alexander's reputation isn't so direly in need of correction.)</p>
<p>Thus, I don't think I should say whether Yudkowsky replied to Michael's and my emails, nor (again) whether he accepted the cheerful-price money, because any conversation that may or may not have occurred would have been private. But what I <em>can</em> say, because it was public, is that we saw <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1068071036732694529">this addition to the Twitter thread</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was sent this (by a third party) as a possible example of the sort of argument I was looking to read: <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/</a>. Without yet judging its empirical content, I agree that it is not ontologically confused. It's not going "But this is a MAN so using 'she' is LYING."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Look at that! The great Eliezer Yudkowsky said that my position is "not ontologically confused." That's probably high praise, coming from him!</p>
<p>You might think that that should have been the end of the story. Yudkowsky denounced a particular philosophical confusion, I already had a related objection written up, and he publicly acknowledged my objection as not being the confusion he was trying to police. I <em>should</em> be satisfied, right?</p>
<p>I wasn't, in fact, satisfied. This little "not ontologically confused" clarification buried deep in the replies was much less visible than the bombastic, arrogant top-level pronouncement insinuating that resistance to gender-identity claims <em>was</em> confused. (1 Like on this reply, <em>vs.</em> 140 Likes/18 Retweets on start of thread.) This little follow-up did not seem likely to disabuse the typical reader of the impression that Yudkowsky thought gender-identity skeptics didn't have a leg to stand on. Was it greedy of me to want something <em>louder</em>?</p>
<p>Greedy or not, I wasn't done flipping out. On 1 December 2019, I wrote to Scott Alexander (cc'ing a few other people) to ask if there was any chance of an explicit and loud clarification or partial retraction of <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"... Not Man for the Categories"</a> (Subject: "super-presumptuous mail about categorization and the influence graph"). Forget my boring whining about the autogynephilia/two-types thing, I said—that's a complicated empirical claim, and not the key issue.</p>
<p>The <em>issue</em> was that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful). You want to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">draw your category boundaries such that</a> things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes">information-theoretically limited budget</a> of short words on the simplest and most widely useful categories.</p>
<p>It was true that <a href="/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/">the reason <em>I</em> was continuing to freak out about this</a> to the extent of sending him this obnoxious email telling him what to write (seriously, who does that?!) was because of transgender stuff, but that wasn't why <em>Scott</em> should care.</p>
<p>The other year, Alexander had written a post, <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/">"Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning"</a>, explaining the consequences of political censorship with an allegory about a Society with the dogma that thunder occurs before lightning.<sup id="fnref:kolmogorov-pun"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:kolmogorov-pun">4</a></sup> Alexander had explained that the problem with complying with the dictates of a false orthodoxy wasn't the sacred dogma itself (it's not often that you need to <em>directly</em> make use of the fact that lightning comes first), but that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies">the need to <em>defend</em> the sacred dogma</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology">destroys everyone's ability to think</a>.</p>
<p>It was the same thing here. It wasn't that I had any practical need to misgender anyone in particular. It still wasn't okay that talking about the reality of biological sex to so-called "rationalists" got you an endless deluge of—polite! charitable! non-ostracism-threatening!—<em>bullshit nitpicking</em>. (What about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome">complete androgen insensitivity syndrome</a>? Why doesn't this ludicrous misinterpretation of what you said <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">imply that lesbians aren't women</a>? <em>&c. ad infinitum</em>.) With enough time, I thought the nitpicks could and should be satisfactorily answered; any remaining would presumably be fatal criticisms rather than bullshit nitpicks. But while I was in the process of continuing to write all that up, I hoped Alexander could see why I felt somewhat gaslighted.</p>
<p>(I had been told by others that I wasn't using the word "gaslighting" correctly. No one seemed to think I had the right to define <em>that</em> category boundary for my convenience.)</p>
<p>If our vaunted rationality techniques resulted in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I didn't think that I was a woman (where "not a woman" is a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a much longer statement about <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes">naïve Bayes models</a> and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">high-dimensional configuration spaces</a> and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes">defensible Schelling points for social norms</a>), then our techniques were worse than useless.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves">If Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves"</a>, there's a long and nuanced conversation you could have about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense, as opposed to some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in November 2014 when "... Not Man for the Categories" was published, but in retrospect, maybe it was a <em>bad</em> idea to build a <a href="https://archive.is/VEeqX">memetic superweapon</a> that says that the number of epicycles <em>doesn't matter</em>.</p>
<p>The reason to write this as a desperate email plea to Scott Alexander instead of working on my own blog was that I was afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propagating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arose, what actually happened was that people like Alexander and Yudkowsky rose to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else absorbed some of their worldview (plus noise and <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/">conformity with the local environment</a>). So for people who didn't <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/">win the talent lottery</a> but thought they saw a flaw in the <em>zeitgeist</em>, the winning move was "persuade Scott Alexander."</p>
<p>Back in 2010, the rationalist community had a shared understanding that the function of language is to describe reality. Now, we didn't. If Scott didn't want to cite my creepy blog about my creepy fetish, that was fine; I liked getting credit, but the important thing was that this "No, the Emperor isn't naked—oh, well, we're not claiming that he's wearing any garments—it would be pretty weird if we were claiming <em>that!</em>—it's just that utilitarianism implies that the <em>social</em> property of clothedness should be defined this way because to do otherwise would be really mean to people who don't have anything to wear" maneuver needed to <em>die</em>, and he alone could kill it.</p>
<p>Scott didn't get it. We agreed that gender categories based on self-identity, natal sex, and passing each had their own pros and cons, and that it's uninteresting to focus on whether something "really" belongs to a category rather than on communicating what you mean. Scott took this to mean that what convention to use is a pragmatic choice we can make on utilitarian grounds, and that being nice to trans people was worth a little bit of clunkiness—that the mental health benefits to trans people were obviously enough to tip the first-order utilitarian calculus.</p>
<p>I didn't think anything about "mental health benefits to trans people" was obvious. More importantly, I considered myself to be prosecuting not the object-level question of which gender categories to use but the meta-level question of what normative principles govern the use of categories. For this, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice" wasn't an answer, because the normative principles exclude "just be nice" from being a relevant consideration.</p>
<p><a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"... Not Man for the Categories"</a> had concluded with a section on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton">Emperor Norton</a>, a 19th-century San Francisco resident who declared himself Emperor of the United States. Certainly, it's not difficult or costly for the citizens of San Francisco to address Norton as "Your Majesty". But there's more to being Emperor of the United States than what people call you. Unless we abolish Congress and have the military enforce Norton's decrees, he's not actually emperor—at least not according to the currently generally understood meaning of the word.</p>
<p>What are you going to do if Norton takes you literally? Suppose he says, "I ordered the Imperial Army to invade Canada last week; where are the troop reports? And why do the newspapers keep talking about this so-called 'President' Rutherford B. Hayes? Have this pretender Hayes executed at once and bring his head to me!"</p>
<p>You're not really going to bring him Rutherford B. Hayes's head. So what are you going to tell him? "Oh, well, you're not a <em>cis</em> emperor who can command executions. But don't worry! Trans emperors are emperors"?</p>
<p>To be sure, words can be used in many ways depending on context, but insofar as Norton <em>is</em> interpreting "emperor" in the traditional sense, and you keep calling him your emperor without caveats or disclaimers, <em>you are lying to him</em>.</p>
<p>Scott still didn't get it. But I did soon end up in more conversation with Michael Vassar, Ben Hoffman, and Sarah Constantin, who were game to help me reach out to Yudkowsky again to explain the problem in more detail—and to appeal to the conscience of someone who built their career on <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger">higher standards</a>.</p>
<p>Yudkowsky probably didn't think much of <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> (judging by <a href="http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/20">an offhand remark by our protagonist in <em>Harry Potter and the Methods</em></a>), but I kept thinking of the scene<sup id="fnref:atlas-shrugged-ref"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:atlas-shrugged-ref">5</a></sup> where our heroine, Dagny Taggart, entreats the great Dr. Robert Stadler to denounce <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly">an egregiously deceptive but technically-not-lying statement</a> by the State Science Institute, whose legitimacy derives from its association with his name. Stadler has become cynical in his old age and demurs: "I can't help what people think—if they think at all!" ... "How can one deal in truth when one deals with the public?"</p>
<p>At this point, I still trusted Yudkowsky to do better than an Ayn Rand villain; I had faith that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts"><em>Eliezer Yudkowsky</em></a> could deal in truth when he deals with the public.</p>
<p>(I was wrong.)</p>
<p>If we had this entire posse, I felt bad and guilty and ashamed about focusing too much on my special interest except insofar as it was genuinely a proxy for "Has Eliezer and/or everyone else <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/">lost the plot</a>, and if so, how do we get it back?" But the group seemed to agree that my philosophy-of-language grievance was a useful test case.</p>
<p>At times, it felt like my mind shut down with only the thought, "What am I doing? This is absurd. Why am I running around picking fights about the philosophy of language—and worse, with me arguing for the <em>Bad</em> Guys' position? Maybe I'm wrong and should stop making a fool of myself. After all, using <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/aumann-s-agreement-theorem">Aumann-like</a> reasoning, in a dispute of 'me and Michael Vassar vs. <em>everyone else</em>', wouldn't I want to bet on 'everyone else'?"</p>
<p>Except ... I had been raised back in the 'aughts to believe that you're you're supposed to concede arguments on the basis of encountering a superior counterargument, and I couldn't actually point to one. "Maybe I'm making a fool out of myself by picking fights with all these high-status people" is not a counterargument.</p>
<p>Anna continued to be disinclined to take a side in the brewing Category War, and it was beginning to put a strain on our friendship, to the extent that I kept ending up crying during our occasional meetings. She said that my "You have to pass my philosophy-of-language litmus test or I lose all respect for you as a rationalist" attitude was psychologically coercive. I agreed—I was even willing to go up to "violent", in the sense that I'd cop to <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/">trying to apply social incentives toward an outcome rather than merely exchanging information</a>. But sometimes you need to use violence in defense of self or property. If we thought of the "rationalist" brand name as intellectual property, maybe it was property worth defending, and if so, then "I can define a word any way I want" wasn't an obviously terrible time to start shooting at the bandits.</p>
<p>My hope was that it was possible to apply just enough "What kind of rationalist are <em>you</em>?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (<a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/">Red</a>) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments—though I wasn't sure if that even works, and I was growing exhausted from all the social aggression I was doing. (If someone tries to take your property and you shoot at them, you could be said to be the "aggressor" in the sense that you fired the first shot, even if you hope that the courts will uphold your property claim later.)</p>
<p>After some more discussion within the me/Michael/Ben/Sarah posse, on 4 January 2019, I wrote to Yudkowsky again (a second time), to explain the specific problems with his "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter performance, since that apparently hadn't been obvious from the earlier link to <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"... To Make Predictions"</a>. I cc'ed the posse, who chimed in afterwards.</p>
<p><a id="ex-cathedra-statement-ask"></a>Ben explained what kind of actions we were hoping for from Yudkowsky: that he would (1) notice that he'd accidentally been participating in an epistemic war, (2) generalize the insight (if he hadn't noticed, what were the odds that MIRI had adequate defenses?), and (3) join the conversation about how to <em>actually</em> have a rationality community, while noticing this particular way in which the problem seemed harder than it used to. For my case in particular, something that would help would be either (A) a clear <em>ex cathedra</em> statement that gender categories are not an exception to the general rule that categories are nonarbitrary, <em>or</em> (B) a clear <em>ex cathedra</em> statement that he's been silenced on this matter. If even (B) was too politically expensive, that seemed like important evidence about (1).</p>
<p>Without revealing the other side of any private conversation that may or may not have occurred, I can say that we did not get either of those <em>ex cathedra</em> statements at this time.</p>
<p>It was also around this time that our posse picked up a new member, whom I'll call "Riley".</p>
<hr>
<p>On 5 January 2019, I met with Michael and his associate Aurora Quinn-Elmore in San Francisco to attempt mediated discourse with <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230601015012/https://sinceriously.fyi/">Ziz</a> and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230308021910/https://everythingtosaveit.how/">Gwen</a>, who were considering suing the <a href="https://rationality.org/">Center for Applied Rationality</a> (CfAR)<sup id="fnref:what-is-cfar"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:what-is-cfar">6</a></sup> for discriminating against trans women. Michael hoped to dissuade them from a lawsuit—not because he approved of CfAR's behavior, but because lawyers make everything worse.</p>
<p>Despite our personality and worldview differences, I had had a number of cooperative interactions with Ziz a couple years before. We had argued about the etiology of transsexualism in late 2016. When I sent her some delusional PMs during my February 2017 psychotic break, she came over to my apartment with chocolate ("allegedly good against dementors"), although I wasn't there. I had awarded her $1200 as part of a <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/friends-can-change-the-world-or-request-for-social-technology-credit-assignment-rituals/">credit-assignment ritual</a> to compensate the twenty-one people who were most responsible for me successfully navigating my psychological crises of February and April 2017. (The fact that she had been up to <em>argue</em> about trans etiology meant a lot to me.) I had accepted some packages for her at my apartment in mid-2017 when she was preparing to live on a boat and didn't have a mailing address.</p>
<p>At this meeting, Ziz recounted <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">her</a> story of how Anna Salamon (in her capacity as President of CfAR and community leader) allegedly engaged in <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/">conceptual warfare</a> to falsely portray Ziz as a predatory male. I was unimpressed: in my worldview, I didn't think Ziz had the right to say "I'm not a man," and expect people to just believe that. (<a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1081952880649596928">I remember that</a> at one point, Ziz answered a question with, "Because I don't run off masochistic self-doubt like you." I replied, "That's fair.") But I did respect that Ziz actually believed in an intersex brain theory: in Ziz and Gwen's worldview, people's genders were a <em>fact</em> of the matter, not a manipulation of consensus categories to make people happy.</p>
<p>Probably the most ultimately consequential part of this meeting was Michael verbally confirming to Ziz that MIRI had settled with a disgruntled former employee, Louie Helm, who had put up a website slandering them. (I don't know the details of the alleged settlement. I'm working off of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/">Ziz's notes</a> rather than remembering that part of the conversation clearly myself; I don't know what Michael knew.) What was significant was that if MIRI <em>had</em> paid Helm as part of an agreement to get the slanderous website taken down, then (whatever the nonprofit best-practice books might have said about whether this was a wise thing to do when facing a dispute from a former employee) that would decision-theoretically amount to a blackmail payout, which seemed to contradict MIRI's advocacy of timeless decision theories (according to which you <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">shouldn't be the kind of agent that yields to extortion</a>).</p>
<hr>
<p><a id="physical-injuries"></a>Something else Ben had said while chiming in on the second attempt to reach out to Yudkowsky hadn't sat quite right with me.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am pretty worried that if I actually point out the <strong><em>physical injuries</em></strong> sustained by some of the smartest, clearest-thinking, and kindest people I know in the Rationalist community as a result of this sort of thing, I'll be dismissed as a mean person who wants to make other people feel bad.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I didn't know what he was talking about. My friend "Rebecca"'s 2015 psychiatric imprisonment ("hospitalization") had probably been partially related to her partner's transition and had involved rough handling by the cops. I had been through some Bad Stuff during my psychotic episodes of February and April 2017, but none of it was "physical injuries." What were the other cases, if he could share without telling me Very Secret Secrets With Names?</p>
<p>Ben said that, probabilistically, he expected that some fraction of the trans women he knew who had "voluntarily" had bottom surgery had done so in response to social pressure, even if some of them might well have sought it out in a less weaponized culture.</p>
<p>I said that saying, "I am worried that if I actually point out the physical injuries ..." when the actual example turned out to be sex reassignment surgery seemed dishonest: I had thought he might have more examples of situations like mine or "Rebecca"'s, where gaslighting escalated into more tangible harm in a way that people wouldn't know about by default. In contrast, people already know that bottom surgery is a thing; Ben just had reasons to think it's Actually Bad—reasons that his friends couldn't engage with if <em>we didn't know what he was talking about</em>. It was bad enough that Yudkowsky was being so cagey; if <em>everyone</em> did it, then we were really doomed.</p>
<p>Ben said he was more worried that saying politically loaded things in the wrong order would reduce our chances of getting engagement from Yudkowsky than that someone would share his words out of context in a way that caused him distinct harm. And maybe more than both of those, that saying the wrong keywords would cause his correspondents to talk about <em>him</em> using the wrong keywords, in ways that caused illegible, hard-to-trace damage.</p>
<hr>
<p>There's a view that assumes that as long as everyone is being cordial, our truthseeking public discussion must be basically on track; the discussion is only being warped by the fear of heresy if someone is overtly calling to burn the heretics.</p>
<p>I do not hold this view. I think there's a subtler failure mode where people know what the politically favored <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line">bottom line</a> is, and collude to ignore, nitpick, or just be <em>uninterested</em> in any fact or line of argument that doesn't fit. I want to distinguish between direct ideological conformity enforcement attempts, and people not living up to their usual epistemic standards in response to ideological conformity enforcement.</p>
<p>Especially compared to normal Berkeley, I had to give the Berkeley "rationalists" credit for being very good at free speech norms. (I'm not sure I would be saying this in the possible world where Scott Alexander didn't have a <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/">traumatizing experience with social justice in college</a>, causing him to dump a ton of <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/things-i-will-regret-writing/">anti-social-justice</a>, <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/">pro-argumentative-charity</a> antibodies into the "rationalist" water supply after he became our subculture's premier writer. But it was true in <em>our</em> world.) I didn't want to fall into the <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/">bravery-debate</a> trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)". I wasn't angry at the "rationalists" for silencing me (which they didn't); I was angry at them for making bad arguments and systematically refusing to engage with the obvious counterarguments.</p>
<p>As an illustrative example, in an argument on Discord in January 2019, I said, "I need the phrase 'actual women' in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call 'trans women' would want to make use of that technology; I need language that <em>asymmetrically</em> distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology".</p>
<p><a id="people-who-would-get-surgery-to-have-the-ideal-female-body"></a>Kelsey Piper replied, "the people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints."</p>
<p>Another woman said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" (to the acclaim of four "+1" emoji reactions).</p>
<p>The problem with this kind of exchange is not that anyone is being shouted down, nor that anyone is lying. The <em>problem</em> is that people are motivatedly, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie">"algorithmically"</a> "playing dumb." I wish we had more standard terminology for this phenomenon, which is ubiquitous in human life. By "playing dumb", I don't mean that Kelsey was consciously thinking, "I'm playing dumb in order to gain an advantage in this argument." I don't doubt that, subjectively, mentioning that cis women also get cosmetic surgery felt like a relevant reply. It's just that, in context, I was obviously trying to talk about the natural category of "biological sex", and Kelsey could have figured that out if she had wanted to.</p>
<p>It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain">The elephant in the brain</a> knew it wouldn't be able to get away with <em>that</em>.) But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to talk about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt some trans person's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of <em>de facto</em> biological sex denialism. ("'The original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me"!!) It's not that hard to get people to admit that trans women are different from cis women, but somehow they can't (in public, using words) follow the implication that trans women are different from cis women <em>because</em> trans women are male.</p>
<p>Ben thought I was wrong to see this behavior as non-ostracizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking <em>is</em> an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people were playing when they did that was to force me to choose between doing arbitrarily large amounts of <a href="https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/">interpretive labor</a> or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, <em>&c.</em></p>
<p>I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than, "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people whom he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of <em>making</em> them understand if I just didn't give up. Not to play chess with a pigeon (which craps on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles">what the Tortoise said to Achilles</a>—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be boundedly motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.</p>
<p>(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program">holonovel</a> adaptation of <em>Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality</em>, Emma Watson having charged me <a href="/2019/Dec/comp/">the standard licensing fee</a> to use a copy of her body for the occasion: "<a href="https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30">We can do anything if we</a> exert arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor!")</p>
<p>Ben thought that making them understand was hopeless and that becoming a stronger writer was a boring goal; it would be a better use of my talents to jump up a meta level and explain <em>how</em> people were failing to engage. That is, insofar as I expected arguing to work, I had a model of "the rationalists" that kept making bad predictions. What was going on there? Something interesting might happen if I tried to explain <em>that</em>.</p>
<p>(I guess I'm only now, after spending an additional four years exhausting every possible line of argument, taking Ben's advice on this by finishing and publishing this memoir. Sorry, Ben—and thanks.)</p>
<hr>
<p>One thing I regret about my behavior during this period was the extent to which I was emotionally dependent on my posse, and in some ways particularly Michael, for validation. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the <em>Overcoming Bias</em> era (to the extent that there was a "community" in those early days).<sup id="fnref:overcoming-bias"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:overcoming-bias">7</a></sup> I had been skeptical of him: the guy makes a lot of stridently "out there" assertions, in a way that makes you assume he must be speaking metaphorically. (He always insists he's being completely literal.) But he had social proof as the President of the Singularity Institute—the "people person" of our world-saving effort, to complement Yudkowsky's antisocial mad scientist personality—which inclined me to take his assertions more charitably than I otherwise would have.</p>
<p>Now, the memory of that social proof was a lifeline. Dear reader, if you've never been in the position of disagreeing with the entire weight of Society's educated opinion, including your idiosyncratic subculture that tells itself a story about being smarter and more open-minded than the surrounding Society—well, it's stressful. <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/anvwr8/experts_in_any_given_field_how_would_you_say_the/eg1ga9a/">There was a comment on the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit around this time</a> that cited Yudkowsky, Alexander, Piper, Ozy Brennan, and Rob Bensinger as leaders of the "rationalist" community. Just an arbitrary Reddit comment of no significance whatsoever—but it was a salient indicator of the <em>zeitgeist</em> to me, because <em><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521">every</a> <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">single</a> <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">one</a> of <a href="https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and">those</a> <a href="/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png">people</a></em> had tried to get away with some variant on the "word usage is subjective, therefore you have no grounds to object to the claim that trans women are women" mind game.</p>
<p>In the face of that juggernaut of received opinion, I was already feeling pretty gaslighted. ("We ... we had a whole Sequence about this. And <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButYouWereThereAndYouAndYou"><em>you</em> were there, and <em>you</em> were there</a> ... It—really happened, right? The <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">hyperlinks</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">still</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace">work</a> ...") I don't know how I would have held up intact if I were facing it alone. I <em>definitely</em> wouldn't have had the impudence to pester Alexander and Yudkowsky—especially Yudkowsky—if it was just me against everyone else.</p>
<p>But <em>Michael thought I was in the right</em>—not just intellectually, but <em>morally</em> in the right to be prosecuting the philosophy issue with our leaders. That social proof gave me a lot of bravery that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to muster up—even though it would have been better if I could have internalized that my dependence on him was self-undermining, insofar as Michael himself said that what made me valuable was my ability to think independently.</p>
<p>The social proof was probably more effective in my head than with anyone we were arguing with. I remembered Michael as a high-status community elder back in the <em>Overcoming Bias</em> era, but that had been a long time ago. (Luke Muelhauser had taken over leadership of the Singularity Institute in 2011, and apparently, some sort of rift between Michael and Eliezer had widened in recent years.) Michael's status in "the community" of 2019 was much more mixed. He was intensely critical of the rise of the Effective Altruism movement, which he saw as using bogus claims about how to do the most good to prey on the smartest and most scrupulous people around. (I remember being at a party in 2015 and asking Michael what else I should spend my San Francisco software engineer money on, if not the EA charities I was considering. I was surprised when his answer was, "You.")</p>
<p>Another blow to Michael's reputation was dealt on 27 February 2019, when Anna <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u8GMcpEN9Z6aQiCvp/rule-thinkers-in-not-out?commentId=JLpyLwR2afav2xsyD">published a comment badmouthing Michael and suggesting that talking to him was harmful</a>, which I found disappointing—more so as I began to realize the implications.</p>
<p>I agreed with her point about how "ridicule of obviously-fallacious reasoning plays an important role in discerning which thinkers can (or can't) help" fill the role of vetting and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge">common knowledge</a> creation. That's why I was so heartbroken about the "categories are arbitrary, therefore trans women are women" thing, which deserved to be laughed out of the room. Why was she trying to ostracize the guy who was one of the very few to back me up on this incredibly obvious thing!? The reasons given to discredit Michael seemed weak. (He ... flatters people? He ... <em>didn't</em> tell people to abandon their careers? What?) And the evidence against Michael she offered in private didn't seem much more compelling (<em>e.g.</em>, at a CfAR event, he had been insistent on continuing to talk to someone who Anna thought looked near psychosis and needed a break).</p>
<p>It made sense for Anna to not like Michael anymore because of his personal conduct, or because of his opposition to EA. (Expecting all of my friends to be friends with each other would be <a href="http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html">Geek Social Fallacy #4</a>.) If she didn't want to invite him to CfAR stuff, fine. But what did she gain from publicly denouncing him as someone whose "lies/manipulations can sometimes disrupt [people's] thinking for long and costly periods of time"?! She said she was trying to undo the effects of her previous endorsements of him, and that the comment seemed like it ought to be okay by Michael's standards (which didn't include an expectation that people should collude to protect each other's reputations).</p>
<hr>
<p>I wasn't the only one whose life was being disrupted by political drama in early 2019. On 22 February, Scott Alexander <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/">posted that the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Thread was being moved</a> to a new non–<em>Slate Star Codex</em>–branded subreddit in the hopes that would curb some of the harassment he had been receiving. Alexander claimed that according to poll data and his own impressions, the Culture War Thread featured a variety of ideologically diverse voices but had nevertheless acquired a reputation as being a hive of right-wing scum and villainy.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1099134795131478017">Yudkowsky Tweeted</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your annual reminder that Slate Star Codex is not and never was alt-right, every real stat shows as much, and the primary promoters of this lie are sociopaths who get off on torturing incredibly nice targets like Scott A.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I found Yudkowsky's use of the word "lie" here interesting given his earlier eagerness to police the use of the word "lie" by gender-identity skeptics. With the support of my posse, I wrote to him again, a third time (Subject: "on defending against 'alt-right' categorization").</p>
<p>I said, imagine if one of Alexander's critics were to reply: "Using language in a way <em>you</em> dislike, openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning, is not lying. The proposition you claim false (explicit advocacy of a white ethnostate?) is not what the speech is meant to convey—and this is known to everyone involved, it is not a secret. You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning. Now, maybe as a matter of policy, you want to make a case for language like 'alt-right' being used a certain way. Well, that's a separate debate then. But you're not making a stand for Truth in doing so, and your opponents aren't tricking anyone or trying to."</p>
<p>How would Yudkowsky react if someone said that? <em>My model</em> of the Sequences-era Yudkowsky of 2009 would say, "This is an intellectually dishonest attempt to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations">sneak in connotations</a> by performing a categorization and using an <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters">appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation-halter</a> to avoid having to justify it; go read <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb">'A Human's Guide to Words.'</a>"</p>
<p>But I had no idea what the real Yudkowsky of 2019 would say. If the moral of the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread had been that the word "lie" should be reserved for <em>per se</em> direct falsehoods, well, what direct falsehood was being asserted by Scott's detractors? I didn't think anyone was claiming that, say, Scott <em>identified</em> as alt-right, any more than anyone was claiming that trans women have two X chromosomes. Commenters on /r/SneerClub had been pretty explicit in <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh0xlgx/">their</a> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/atgejh/rssc_holds_a_funeral_for_the_defunct_culture_war/eh3jrth/">criticism</a> that the Culture War thread harbored racists (<em>&c.</em>) and possibly that Scott himself was a secret racist, with respect to a definition of racism that included the belief that there exist genetically mediated population differences in the distribution of socially relevant traits and that this probably had decision-relevant consequences that should be discussable somewhere.</p>
<p>And this was <em>correct</em>. For example, Alexander's <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/">"The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"</a> favorably cites Cochran <em>et al.</em>'s genetic theory of Ashkenazi achievement as "really compelling." Scott was almost certainly "guilty" of the category membership that the speech was meant to convey—it's just that Sneer Club got to choose the category. If a machine-learning classifier returns positive on both Scott Alexander and Richard Spencer, the correct response is not that the classifier is "lying" (what would that even mean?) but that the classifier is not very useful for understanding Scott Alexander's effects on the world.</p>
<p>Of course, Scott is great, and it was right that we should defend him from the bastards trying to ruin his reputation, and it was plausible that the most politically convenient way to do that was to pound the table and call them lying sociopaths rather than engaging with the substance of their claims—much as how someone being tried under an unjust law might plead "Not guilty" to save their own skin rather than tell the whole truth and hope for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification">jury nullification</a>.</p>
<p>But, I argued, political convenience came at a dire cost to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes">our common interest</a>. There was a proverb Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K2c3dkKErsqFd28Dh/prices-or-bindings">had once failed to Google</a>, that ran something like, "Once someone is known to be a liar, you might as well listen to the whistling of the wind."</p>
<p>Similarly, once someone is known to <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/">vary</a> the epistemic standards of their public statements for political convenience—if they say categorizations can be lies when that happens to help their friends, but seemingly deny the possibility when that happens to make them look good politically ...</p>
<p>Well, you're still better off listening to them than the whistling of the wind, because the wind in various possible worlds is presumably uncorrelated with most of the things you want to know about, whereas <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence">clever arguers</a> who <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases">don't tell explicit lies</a> are constrained in how much they can mislead you. But it seems plausible that you might as well listen to any other arbitrary smart person with a blue check and 20K Twitter followers. It might be a useful exercise, for Yudkowsky to think of what he would <em>actually say</em> if someone with social power <em>actually did this to him</em> when he was trying to use language to reason about Something he had to Protect?</p>
<p>(Note, my claim here is <em>not</em> that "Pronouns aren't lies" and "Scott Alexander is not a racist" are similarly misinformative. Rather, I'm saying that whether "You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning" makes sense <em>as a response to</em> "<em>X</em> isn't a <em>Y</em>" shouldn't depend on the specific values of <em>X</em> and <em>Y</em>. Yudkowsky's behavior the other month had made it look like he thought that "You're not standing in defense of truth if ..." <em>was</em> a valid response when, say, <em>X</em> = "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlyn_Jenner">Caitlyn Jenner</a>" and <em>Y</em> = "woman." I was saying that whether or not it's a valid response, we should, as a matter of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization">local validity</a>, apply the <em>same</em> standard when <em>X</em> = "Scott Alexander" and <em>Y</em> = "racist.")</p>
<p>Without disclosing any specific content from private conversations that may or may not have happened, I can say that our posse did not get the kind of engagement from Yudkowsky that we were hoping for.</p>
<p>Michael said that it seemed important that, if we thought Yudkowsky wasn't interested, we should have common knowledge among ourselves that we considered him to be choosing to be a cult leader.</p>
<p>I settled on Sara Bareilles's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA">"Gonna Get Over You"</a> as my breakup song with Yudkowsky and the rationalists, often listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg">a cover of it</a> on loop to numb the pain. I found <a href="https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics">the lyrics</a> were readily interpretable as being about my problems, even if Sara Bareilles had a different kind of breakup in mind. ("I tell myself to let the story end"—the story of the rationalists as a world-changing intellectual movement. "And my heart will rest in someone else's hand"—Michael Vassar's. "And I'm not the girl that I intend to be"—self-explanatory.)<sup id="fnref:breakup-songs"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:breakup-songs">8</a></sup></p>
<p>Meanwhile, my email thread with Scott started up again. I expressed regret that all the times I had emailed him over the past couple years had been when I was upset about something (like <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">psych hospitals</a>, or—something else) and wanted something from him, treating him as a means rather than an end—and then, despite that regret, I continued prosecuting the argument.</p>
<p><a id="noncentral-fallacy"></a>One of Alexander's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world">most popular <em>Less Wrong</em> posts ever had been about the noncentral fallacy, which Alexander called "the worst argument in the world"</a>: those who (for example) crow that abortion is <em>murder</em> (because murder is the killing of a human being), or that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a <em>criminal</em> (because he defied the segregation laws of the South), are engaging in a dishonest rhetorical maneuver in which they're trying to trick their audience into assigning attributes of the typical "murder" or "criminal" to what are very noncentral members of those categories.</p>
<p>Even if you're opposed to abortion, or have negative views about the historical legacy of Dr. King, this isn't the right way to argue. If you call Fiona a <em>murderer</em>, that causes me to form a whole bunch of implicit probabilistic expectations on the basis of what the typical "murder" is like—expectations about Fiona's moral character, about the suffering of a victim whose hopes and dreams were cut short, about Fiona's relationship with the law, <em>&c.</em>—most of which get violated when you reveal that the murder victim was an embryo.</p>
<p><a href="/ancillary/twelve-short-stories-about-language/">In the form of a series of short parables</a>, I tried to point out that Alexander's own "The Worst Argument in the World" is complaining about the <em>same</em> category-gerrymandering move that his "... Not Man for the Categories" comes out in favor of. We would not let someone get away with declaring, "I ought to accept an unexpected abortion or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally not be considered murder if it'll save someone's life." Maybe abortion <em>is</em> wrong and relevantly similar to the central sense of "murder", but you need to make that case <em>on the empirical merits</em>, not by linguistic fiat (Subject: "twelve short stories about language").</p>
<p>Scott still didn't get it. He didn't see why he shouldn't accept one unit of categorizational awkwardness in exchange for sufficiently large utilitarian benefits. He made an analogy to some lore from the <a href="https://www.glowfic.com/">Glowfic</a> collaborative fiction writing community, a story about orcs who had unwisely sworn a oath to serve the evil god Melkor. Though the orcs intend no harm of their own will, they're magically bound to obey Melkor's commands and serve as his terrible army or else suffer unbearable pain. Our heroine comes up with a solution: she founds a new religion featuring a deist God who also happens to be named "Melkor". She convinces the orcs that since the oath didn't specify <em>which</em> Melkor, they're free to follow her new God instead of evil Melkor, and the magic binding the oath apparently accepts this casuistry if the orcs themselves do.</p>
<p>Scott's attitude toward the new interpretation of the oath in the story was analogous to his thinking about transgenderedness: sure, the new definition may be a little awkward and unnatural, but it's not objectively false, and it made life better for so many orcs. If <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality">rationalists should win</a>, then the true rationalist in this story was the one who thought up this clever hack to save an entire species.</p>
<p>I started drafting a long reply—but then I remembered that in recent discussion with my posse, the idea had come up that in-person meetings are better for resolving disagreements. Would Scott be up for meeting in person some weekend? Non-urgent. Ben would be willing to moderate, unless Scott wanted to suggest someone else, or no moderator.</p>
<p>Scott didn't want to meet. I considered resorting to the tool of cheerful prices, which I hadn't yet used against Scott—to say, "That's totally understandable! Would a financial incentive change your decision? For a two-hour meeting, I'd be happy to pay up to $4000 to you or your preferred charity. If you don't want the money, then let's table this. I hope you're having a good day." But that seemed sufficiently psychologically coercive and socially weird that I wasn't sure I wanted to go there. On 18 March, I emailed my posse asking what they thought—and then added that maybe they shouldn't reply until Friday, because it was Monday, and I really needed to focus on my dayjob that week.</p>
<p><a id="overheating"></a>This is the part where I began to ... overheat. I tried ("tried") to focus on my dayjob, but I was just <em>so angry</em>. Did Scott really not understand the rationality-relevant distinction between "value-dependent categories as a result of caring about predicting different variables" (as explained by the <em>dagim</em>/water-dwellers <em>vs.</em> fish example in "... Not Man for the Categories") and "value-dependent categories in order to not make my friends sad"? Was he that dumb? Or was it that he was <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/">only</a> <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/">verbal-smart</a>, and this is the sort of thing that only makes sense if you've ever been good at linear algebra? (Such that the language of "only running your clustering algorithm on the subspace of the configuration space spanned by the variables that are relevant to your decisions" would come naturally.) Did I need to write a post explaining just that one point in mathematical detail, with executable code and a worked example with entropy calculations?</p>
<p>My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren't psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person <em>can't do my job</em>.</p>
<p>I was in so much (psychological) pain. Or at least, in one of a series of emails to my posse that night, I felt motivated to type the sentence, "I'm in so much (psychological) pain." I'm never sure how to interpret my own self-reports, because even when I'm really emotionally trashed (crying, shaking, randomly yelling, <em>&c</em>.), I think I'm still noticeably incentivizable: if someone were to present a credible threat (like slapping me and telling me to snap out of it), then I would be able to calm down. There's some sort of game-theory algorithm in the brain that feels subjectively genuine distress (like crying or sending people too many hysterical emails) but only when it can predict that it will be rewarded with sympathy or at least tolerated: <a href="https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/">tears are a discount on friendship</a>.</p>
<p>I <a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1107874587822297089">tweeted a Sequences quote</a> (the mention of @ESYudkowsky being to attribute credit, I told myself; I figured Yudkowsky had enough followers that he probably wouldn't see a notification):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"—and if you still have something to protect, so that you MUST keep going, and CANNOT resign and wisely acknowledge the limitations of rationality— [1/3]</p>
<p>"—then you will be ready to start your journey[.] To take sole responsibility, to live without any trustworthy defenses, and to forge a higher Art than the one you were once taught. [2/3]</p>
<p>"No one begins to truly search for the Way until their parents have failed them, their gods are dead, and their tools have shattered in their hand." —@ESYudkowsky (<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science">https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science</a>) [end/3]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Only it wasn't quite appropriate. The quote is about failure resulting in the need to invent new methods of rationality, better than the ones you were taught. But the methods I had been taught were great! I didn't have a pressing need to improve on them! I just couldn't cope with everyone else having <em>forgotten!</em></p>
<p>I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn't finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 <em>a.m.</em>, I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/04/prodrome/">2013</a> and <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">2017</a> psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments). We really didn't want another outcome like that. There was a couch in the office, and probably another four hours until my coworkers started to arrive. The thing I needed to do was just lie down on the couch in the dark and have faith that sleep would come. Meeting my manager's deadline wasn't <em>that</em> important. When people came in to the office, I might ask for help getting an Uber home? Or help buying melatonin? The important thing was to be calm.</p>
<p>I sent an email explaining this to Scott and my posse and two other friends (Subject: "predictably bad ideas").</p>
<p>Lying down didn't work. So at 5:26 <em>a.m.</em>, I sent an email to Scott cc'ing my posse plus Anna about why I was so mad (both senses). I had a better draft sitting on my desktop at home, but since I was here and couldn't sleep, I might as well type this version (Subject: "five impulsive points, hastily written because I just can't even (was: Re: predictably bad ideas)"). Scott had been continuing to insist it's okay to gerrymander category boundaries for trans people's mental health, but there were a few things I didn't understand. If creatively reinterpreting the meanings of words because the natural interpretation would make people sad is okay, why didn't that generalize to an argument in favor of <em>outright lying</em> when the truth would make people sad? The mind games seemed crueler to me than a simple lie. Also, if "mental health benefits for trans people" matter so much, then why didn't <em>my</em> mental health matter? Wasn't I trans, sort of? Getting shut down by appeal-to-utilitarianism when I was trying to use reason to make sense of the world was observably really bad for <em>my</em> sanity!</p>
<p>Also, Scott had asked me if it wouldn't be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and I had rejected it because of gender stuff. But the original reason it had ever seemed remotely plausible that we would create Utopia forever wasn't "because we're us, the world-saving good guys," but because we were going to perfect an art of <em>systematically correct reasoning</em>. If we weren't going to do systematically correct reasoning because that would make people sad, then that undermined the reason that it was plausible that we would create Utopia forever.</p>
<p>Also-also, Scott had proposed a super–<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/inside-outside-view">Outside View</a> of the culture war as an evolutionary process that produces memes optimized to trigger PTSD syndromes and suggested that I think of <em>that</em> as what was happening to me. But, depending on how much credence Scott put in social proof, mightn't the fact that I managed to round up this whole posse to help me repeatedly argue with (or harass) Yudkowsky shift his estimate over whether my concerns had some objective merit that other people could see, too? It could simultaneously be the case that I had culture-war PTSD <em>and</em> my concerns had merit.</p>
<p>Michael replied at 5:58 <em>a.m.</em>, saying that everyone's first priority should be making sure that I could sleep—that given that I was failing to adhere to my commitments to sleep almost immediately after making them, I should be interpreted as urgently needing help, and that Scott had comparative advantage in helping, given that my distress was most centrally over Scott gaslighting me, asking me to consider the possibility that I was wrong while visibly not considering the same possibility regarding himself.</p>
<p>That seemed a little harsh on Scott to me. At 6:14 <em>a.m.</em> and 6:21 <em>a.m.</em>, I wrote a couple emails to everyone that my plan was to get a train back to my own apartment to sleep, that I was sorry for making such a fuss despite being incentivizable while emotionally distressed, that I should be punished in accordance with the moral law for sending too many hysterical emails because I thought I could get away with it, that I didn't need Scott's help, and that I thought Michael was being a little aggressive about that, but that I guessed that's also kind of Michael's style.</p>
<p>Michael was <em>furious</em> with me. ("What the FUCK Zack!?! Calling now," he emailed me at 6:18 <em>a.m.</em>) I texted and talked with him on my train ride home. He seemed to have a theory that people who are behaving badly, as Scott was, will only change when they see a victim who is being harmed. Me escalating and then immediately deescalating just after Michael came to help was undermining the attempt to force an honest confrontation, such that we could <em>get</em> to the point of having a Society with morality or punishment.</p>
<p>Anyway, I did get to my apartment and sleep for a few hours. One of the other friends I had cc'd on some of the emails, whom I'll call "Meredith", came to visit me later that morning with her 2½-year-old son—I mean, her son at the time.</p>
<p>(Incidentally, the code that I had written intermittently between 11 <em>p.m.</em> and 4 <em>a.m.</em> was a horrible bug-prone mess, and the company has been paying for it ever since.)</p>
<p>At some level, I wanted Scott to know how frustrated I was about his use of "mental health for trans people" as an Absolute Denial Macro. But when Michael started advocating on my behalf, I started to minimize my claims because I had a generalized attitude of not wanting to sell myself as a victim. Ben pointed out that <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">making oneself mentally ill in order to extract political concessions</a> only works if you have a lot of people doing it in a visibly coordinated way—and even if it did work, getting into a dysphoria contest with trans people didn't seem like it led anywhere good.</p>
<p>I supposed that in Michael's worldview, aggression is more honest than passive-aggression. That seemed true, but I was psychologically limited in how much overt aggression I was willing to deploy against my friends. (And particularly Yudkowsky, whom I still hero-worshiped.) But clearly, the tension between "I don't want to do too much social aggression" and "Losing the Category War within the rationalist community is <em>absolutely unacceptable</em>" was causing me to make wildly inconsistent decisions. (Emailing Scott at 4 <em>a.m.</em> and then calling Michael "aggressive" when he came to defend me was just crazy: either one of those things could make sense, but not both.)</p>
<p>Did I just need to accept that was no such a thing as a "rationalist community"? (Sarah had told me as much two years ago while tripsitting me during my psychosis relapse, but I hadn't made the corresponding mental adjustments.)</p>
<p>On the other hand, a possible reason to be attached to the "rationalist" brand name and social identity that wasn't just me being stupid was that <em>the way I talk</em> had been trained really hard on this subculture for <em>ten years</em>. Most of my emails during this whole campaign had contained multiple Sequences or <em>Slate Star Codex</em> links that I could expect the recipients to have read. I could use <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/t2NN6JwMFaqANuLqH/the-strangest-thing-an-ai-could-tell-you">the phrase "Absolute Denial Macro"</a> in conversation and expect to be understood. If I gave up on the "rationalists" being a thing, and went out into the world to make friends with <em>Quillette</em> readers or arbitrary University of Chicago graduates, then I would lose all that accumulated capital. Here, I had a massive home territory advantage because I could appeal to Yudkowsky's writings about the philosophy of language from ten years ago and people couldn't say, "Eliezer <em>who?</em> He's probably a Bad Man."</p>
<p>The language I spoke was <em>mostly</em> educated American English, but I relied on subculture dialect for a lot. My sister has a chemistry doctorate from MIT (and so speaks the language of STEM intellectuals generally), and when I showed her <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"... To Make Predictions"</a>, she reported finding it somewhat hard to read, likely because I casually use phrases like "thus, an excellent <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/">motte</a>" and expect to be understood without the reader taking 10 minutes to read the link. That essay, which was me writing from the heart in the words that came most naturally to me, could not be published in <em>Quillette</em>. The links and phraseology were just too context bound.</p>
<p>Maybe that's why I felt like I had to stand my ground and fight for the world I was made in, even though the contradiction between the war effort and my general submissiveness had me making crazy decisions.</p>
<p><a id="alter-the-beacon"></a>Michael said that a reason to make a stand here in "the community" was because if we didn't, the <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/">beacon</a> of "rationalism" would continue to lure and mislead others—but that more importantly, we needed to figure out how to win this kind of argument decisively, as a group. We couldn't afford to accept a <em>status quo</em> of accepting defeat when faced with bad faith arguments <em>in general</em>. Ben reported writing to Scott to ask him to alter the beacon so that people like me wouldn't think "the community" was the place to go for the rationality thing anymore.</p>
<p>As it happened, the next day, we saw these Tweets from @ESYudkowsky, linking to a <em>Quillette</em> article interviewing Lisa Littman about her work positing a socially contagious "rapid onset" type of gender dysphoria among young females:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512">Everything more complicated than</a> protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190320012155/https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/">https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/</a></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857">To be clear, I don't</a> know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Why now? Maybe he saw the tag in my "tools have shattered" Tweet on Monday, or maybe the <em>Quillette</em> article was just timely?)</p>
<p><a id="proton-concession"></a>The most obvious reading of these Tweets was as a political concession to me. The two-type taxonomy of MtF was the thing I was originally trying to talk about, back in 2016–2017, before getting derailed onto the present philosophy-of-language war, and here Yudkowsky was backing up my side on that.</p>
<p>At this point, some readers might think that this should have been the end of the matter, that I should have been satisfied. I had started the recent drama flare-up because Yudkowsky had Tweeted something unfavorable to my agenda. But now, Yudkowsky was Tweeting something favorable to my agenda! Wouldn't it be greedy and ungrateful for me to keep criticizing him about the pronouns and language thing, given that he'd thrown me a bone here? Shouldn't I call it even?</p>
<p>That's not how it works. The entire concept of "sides" to which one can make "concessions" is an artifact of human coalitional instincts. It's not something that makes sense as a process for constructing a map that reflects the territory. My posse and I were trying to get a clarification about a philosophy-of-language claim Yudkowsky had made a few months prior ("you're not standing in defense of truth if [...]"). Why would we stop prosecuting that because of this unrelated Tweet about the etiology of gender dysphoria? That wasn't the thing we were trying to clarify!</p>
<p>Moreover—and I'm embarrassed that it took me another day to realize this—this new argument from Yudkowsky about the etiology of gender dysphoria was wrong. As I would later get around to explaining in <a href="/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/">"On the Argumentative Form 'Super-Proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties'"</a>, when people claim that some psychological or medical condition "comes in varieties", they're making a substantive <em>empirical</em> claim that the <a href="/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/">causal or statistical structure</a> of the condition is usefully modeled as distinct clusters, not merely making the trivial observation that instances of the condition are not identical down to the subatomic level.</p>
<p>So we <em>shouldn't</em> think that there are probably multiple kinds of gender dysphoria because things are made of protons. If anything, <em>a priori</em> reasoning about the cognitive function of categorization should actually cut in the other direction, (mildly) <em>against</em> rather than in favor of multi-type theories: you only want to add more categories to your theory <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">if they can pay for their additional complexity with better predictions</a>. If you believe in Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy of MtF, or Littman's proposed rapid-onset type, it should be on the empirical merits, not because multi-type theories are <em>a priori</em> more likely to be true (which they aren't).</p>
<p>Had Yudkowsky been thinking that maybe if he Tweeted something favorable to my agenda, then I and the rest of Michael's gang would be satisfied and leave him alone?</p>
<p>But if there's some <em>other</em> reason you suspect there might be multiple species of dysphoria, but you <em>tell</em> people your suspicion is because "everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties", you're still misinforming people for political reasons, which was the <em>general</em> problem we were trying to alert Yudkowsky to. Inventing fake rationality lessons in response to political pressure is not okay, and the fact that in this case the political pressure happened to be coming from me didn't make it okay.</p>
<p>I asked the posse if this analysis was worth sending to Yudkowsky. Michael said it wasn't worth the digression. He asked if I was comfortable generalizing from Scott's behavior, and what others had said about fear of speaking openly, to assuming that something similar was going on with Eliezer? If so, then now that we had common knowledge, we needed to confront the actual crisis, "that dread is tearing apart old friendships and causing fanatics to betray everything that they ever stood for while its existence is still being denied."</p>
<hr>
<p><a id="jessica-joins"></a>That week, former MIRI researcher Jessica Taylor joined our posse (being at an in-person meeting with Ben and Sarah and another friend on the seventeenth, and getting tagged in subsequent emails). I had met Jessica for the first time in March 2017, shortly after my psychotic break, and I had been part of the group trying to take care of her when she had <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pQGFeKvjydztpgnsY/occupational-infohazards">her own break in late 2017</a>, but other than that, we hadn't been particularly close.</p>
<p>Significantly for political purposes, Jessica is trans. We didn't have to agree up front on all gender issues for her to see the epistemology problem with "... Not Man for the Categories", and to say that maintaining a narcissistic fantasy by controlling category boundaries wasn't what <em>she</em> wanted, as a trans person. (On the seventeenth, when I lamented the state of a world that incentivized us to be political enemies, her response was, "Well, we could talk about it first.") Michael said that me and Jessica together had more moral authority than either of us alone.</p>
<p>As it happened, I ran into Scott on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit">BART</a> train that Friday, the twenty-second. He said he wasn't sure why the oft-repeated moral of "A Human's Guide to Words" had been "You can't define a word any way you want" rather than "You <em>can</em> define a word any way you want, but then you have to deal with the consequences."</p>
<p>Ultimately, I thought this was a pedagogy decision that Yudkowsky had gotten right back in 2008. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say, "It's subjective, so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking useful thought about the <em>exact, precise</em> ways that <em>specific, definite</em> things are relative to other specific, definite things.</p>
<p>I told Scott I would send him one more email with a piece of evidence about how other "rationalists" were thinking about the categories issue and give my commentary on the parable about orcs, and then the present thread would probably drop there.</p>
<p>Concerning what others were thinking: on Discord in January, Kelsey Piper had told me that everyone else experienced their disagreement with me as being about where the joints are and which joints are important, where usability for humans was a legitimate criterion of importance, and it was annoying that I thought they didn't believe in carving reality at the joints at all and that categories should be whatever makes people happy.</p>
<p>I <a href="https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1088459797962215429">didn't want to bring it up at the time because</a> I was so overjoyed that the discussion was actually making progress on the core philosophy-of-language issue, but Scott <em>did</em> seem to be pretty explicit that his position was about happiness rather than usability? If Kelsey <em>thought</em> she agreed with Scott, but actually didn't, that sham consensus was a bad sign for our collective sanity, wasn't it?</p>
<p>As for the parable about orcs, I thought it was significant that Scott chose to tell the story from the standpoint of non-orcs deciding what <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password">verbal behaviors</a> to perform while orcs are around, rather than the standpoint of the orcs themselves. For one thing, how do you <em>know</em> that serving evil-Melkor is a life of constant torture? Is it at all possible that someone has given you misleading information about that?</p>
<p>Moreover, you <em>can't</em> just give an orc a clever misinterpretation of an oath and have them believe it. First you have to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology">cripple their <em>general</em> ability</a> to correctly interpret oaths, for the same reason that you can't get someone to believe that 2+2=5 without crippling their general ability to do arithmetic. We weren't talking about a little "white lie" that the listener will never get to see falsified (like telling someone their dead dog is in heaven); the orcs already know the text of the oath, and you have to break their ability to <em>understand</em> it. Are you willing to permanently damage an orc's ability to reason in order to save them pain? For some sufficiently large amount of pain, surely. But this isn't a choice to make lightly—and the choices people make to satisfy their own consciences don't always line up with the volition of their alleged beneficiaries. We think we can lie to save others from pain, without wanting to be lied to ourselves. But behind the veil of ignorance, it's the same choice!</p>
<p>I also had more to say about philosophy of categories: I thought I could be more rigorous about the difference between "caring about predicting different variables" and "caring about consequences", in a way that Eliezer would <em>have</em> to understand even if Scott didn't. (Scott had claimed that he could use gerrymandered categories and still be just as good at making predictions—but that's just not true if we're talking about the <em>internal</em> use of categories as a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms">cognitive algorithm</a>, rather than mere verbal behavior. It's easy to <em>say</em> "<em>X</em> is a <em>Y</em>" for arbitrary <em>X</em> and <em>Y</em> if the stakes demand it, but that's not the same thing as using that concept of <em>Y</em> internally as part of your world-model.)</p>
<p>But after consultation with the posse, I concluded that further email prosecution was not useful at this time; the philosophy argument would work better as a public <em>Less Wrong</em> post. So my revised Category War to-do list was:</p>
<ul>
<li>Send the brief wrapping-up/end-of-conversation email to Scott (with the Discord anecdote about Kelsey and commentary on the orc story).</li>
<li>Mentally write off Scott, Eliezer, and the so-called "rationalist" community as a loss so that I wouldn't be in horrible emotional pain from cognitive dissonance all the time.</li>
<li>Write up the mathy version of the categories argument for <em>Less Wrong</em> (which I thought might take a few months—I had a dayjob, and write slowly, and might need to learn some new math, which I'm also slow at).</li>
<li><em>Then</em> email the link to Scott and Eliezer asking for a signal boost and/or court ruling.</li>
</ul>
<p>Ben didn't think the mathematically precise categories argument was the most important thing for <em>Less Wrong</em> readers to know about: a similarly careful explanation of why I'd written off Scott, Eliezer, and the "rationalists" would be way more valuable.</p>
<p>I could see the value he was pointing at, but something in me balked at the idea of attacking my friends in public (Subject: "treachery, faith, and the great river (was: Re: DRAFTS: 'wrapping up; or, Orc-ham's razor' and 'on the power and efficacy of categories')").</p>
<p>Ben had previously written (in the context of the effective altruism movement) about how <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/honesty-and-perjury/#A_tax_on_criticism">holding criticism to a higher standard than praise distorts our collective map</a>. He was obviously correct that this was a distortionary force relative to what ideal Bayesian agents would do, but I was worried that when we're talking about criticism of <em>people</em> rather than ideas, the removal of the distortionary force would just result in social conflict (and not more truth). Criticism of institutions and social systems should be filed under "ideas" rather than "people", but the smaller-scale you get, the harder this distinction is to maintain: criticizing, say, "the Center for Effective Altruism", somehow feels more like criticizing Will MacAskill personally than criticizing "the United States" does, even though neither CEA nor the U.S. is a person.</p>
<p>That was why I couldn't give up faith that <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/">honest discourse <em>eventually</em> wins</a>. Under my current strategy and consensus social norms, I could criticize Scott or Kelsey or Ozy's <em>ideas</em> without my social life dissolving into a war of all against all, whereas if I were to give in to the temptation to flip a table and say, "Okay, now I <em>know</em> you guys are just messing with me," then I didn't see how that led anywhere good, even if they really <em>were</em>.</p>
<p>Jessica explained what she saw as the problem with this. What Ben was proposing was <em>creating clarity about behavioral patterns</em>. I was saying that I was afraid that creating such clarity is an attack on someone. But if so, then my blog was an attack on trans people. What was going on here?</p>
<p>Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns <em>is</em> construed as an attack and <em>can</em> make things worse for someone. For example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don't care about the truth when it's politically inconvenient is a threat to your marketing story and therefore to your livelihood. As a result, it's easier to create clarity down power gradients than up them: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people's narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Yudkowsky's.<sup id="fnref:trans-power-gradient"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:trans-power-gradient">9</a></sup></p>
<p>But <em>selectively</em> creating clarity down but not up power gradients just reinforces existing power relations—in the same way that selectively criticizing arguments with politically unfavorable conclusions only reinforces your current political beliefs. I shouldn't be able to get away with claiming that <a href="/2017/Mar/smart/">calling non-exclusively-androphilic trans women delusional perverts</a> is okay on the grounds that that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, but that calling out Alexander and Yudkowsky would be unjustified on the grounds of starting a war or whatever. Jessica was on board with a project to tear down narcissistic fantasies in general, but not a project that starts by tearing down trans people's narcissistic fantasies, then emits spurious excuses for not following that effort where it leads.</p>
<p>Somewhat apologetically, I replied that the distinction between truthfully, publicly criticizing group identities and <em>named individuals</em> still seemed important to me?—as did avoiding leaking info from private conversations. I would be more comfortable writing <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/">a scathing blog post about the behavior of "rationalists"</a>, than about a specific person not adhering to good discourse norms in an email conversation that they had good reason to expect to be private. I thought I was consistent about this; contrast my writing with the way that some anti-trans writers name and shame particular individuals. (The closest I had come was <a href="/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#photo-of-danielle-muscato">mentioning Danielle Muscato as someone who doesn't pass</a>—and even there, I admitted it was "unclassy" and done out of desperation.) I had to acknowledge that criticism of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women in general <em>implied</em> criticism of Jessica, and criticism of "rationalists" in general <em>implied</em> criticism of Yudkowsky and Alexander and me, but the extra inferential step and "fog of probability" seemed to make the speech act less of an attack. Was I wrong?</p>
<p><a id="less-precise-is-more-violent"></a>Michael said this was importantly backwards: less precise targeting is more violent. If someone said, "Michael Vassar is a terrible person," he would try to be curious, but if they didn't have an argument, he would tend to worry more "for" them and less "about" them, whereas if someone said, "The Jews are terrible people," he saw that as a more serious threat to his safety. (And rationalists and trans women are exactly the sort of people who get targeted by the same people who target Jews.)</p>
<hr>
<p>Polishing the advanced categories argument from earlier email drafts into a solid <em>Less Wrong</em> post didn't take that long: by 6 April 2019, I had an almost complete draft of the new post, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"Where to Draw the Boundaries?"</a>, that I was pretty happy with.</p>
<p>The title (note: "boundaries", plural) was a play off of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">"Where to Draw the Boundary?"</a> (note: "boundary", singular), a post from Yudkowsky's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb">original Sequence</a> on the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">37 ways in which words can be wrong</a>. In "... Boundary?", Yudkowsky asserts (without argument, as something that all educated people already know) that dolphins don't form a natural category with fish ("Once upon a time it was thought that the word 'fish' included dolphins [...] Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list"). But Alexander's <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"... Not Man for the Categories"</a> directly contradicts this, asserting that there's nothing wrong with the biblical Hebrew word <em>dagim</em> encompassing both fish and cetaceans (dolphins and whales). So who's right—Yudkowsky (2008) or Alexander (2014)? Is there a problem with dolphins being "fish", or not?</p>
<p>In "... Boundaries?", I unify the two positions and explain how both Yudkowsky and Alexander have a point: in high-dimensional configuration space, there's a cluster of finned water-dwelling animals in the subspace of the dimensions along which finned water-dwelling animals are similar to each other, and a cluster of mammals in the subspace of the dimensions along which mammals are similar to each other, and dolphins belong to <em>both</em> of them. Which subspace you pay attention to depends on your values: if you don't care about predicting or controlling some particular variable, you have no reason to look for <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters">similarity clusters</a> along that dimension.</p>
<p>But <em>given</em> a subspace of interest, the <em>technical</em> criterion of drawing category boundaries around <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace">regions of high density in configuration space</a> still applies. There is Law governing which uses of communication signals transmit which information, and the Law can't be brushed off with, "whatever, it's a pragmatic choice, just be nice." I demonstrate the Law with a couple of simple mathematical examples: if you redefine a codeword that originally pointed to one cluster in ℝ³, to also include another, that changes the quantitative predictions you make about an unobserved coordinate given the codeword; if an employer starts giving the title "Vice President" to line workers, that decreases the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information">mutual information</a> between the job title and properties of the job.</p>
<p>(Jessica and Ben's <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/">discussion of the job title example in relation to the <em>Wikipedia</em> summary of Jean Baudrillard's <em>Simulacra and Simulation</em> got published separately</a> and ended up taking on a life of its own <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/">in</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/">future</a> <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/">posts</a>, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z5wF8mdonsM2AuGgt/negative-feedback-and-simulacra">including</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NiTW5uNtXTwBsFkd4/signalling-and-simulacra-level-3">a</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tF8z9HBoBn783Cirz/simulacrum-3-as-stag-hunt-strategy">number</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels">of</a> <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/on-negative-feedback-and-simulacra/">posts</a> <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/">by</a> <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/08/03/unifying-the-simulacra-definitions/">other</a> <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-four-children-of-the-seder-as-the-simulacra-levels/">authors</a>.)</p>
<p>Sarah asked if the math wasn't a bit overkill: were the calculations really necessary to make the basic point that good definitions should be about classifying the world, rather than about what's pleasant or politically expedient to say?</p>
<p>I thought the math was important as an appeal to principle—and <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/">as intimidation</a>. (As it was written, <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/"><em>the tenth virtue is precision!</em></a> Even if you cannot do the math, knowing that the math exists tells you that the dance step is precise and has no room in it for your whims.)</p>
<p>"... Boundaries?" explains all this in the form of discourse with a hypothetical interlocutor arguing for the I-can-define-a-word-any-way-I-want position. In the hypothetical interlocutor's parts, I wove in verbatim quotes (without attribution) from Alexander ("an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false") and Yudkowsky ("You're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"; "Using language in a way <em>you</em> dislike is not lying. The propositions you claim false [...] is not what the [...] is meant to convey, and this is known to everyone involved; it is not a secret") and Bensinger ("doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at").</p>
<p>My thinking here was that the posse's previous email campaigns had been doomed to failure by being too closely linked to the politically contentious object-level topic, which reputable people had strong incentives not to touch with a ten-meter pole. So if I wrote this post <em>just</em> explaining what was wrong with the claims Yudkowsky and Alexander had made about the philosophy of language, with perfectly innocent examples about dolphins and job titles, that would remove the political barrier to Yudkowsky correcting the philosophy of language error. If someone with a threatening social-justicey aura were to say, "Wait, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", the reputable people could stonewall them. (Stonewall <em>them</em> and not <em>me</em>!)</p>
<p>Another reason someone might be reluctant to correct mistakes when pointed out is the fear that such a policy could be abused by motivated nitpickers. It would be pretty annoying to be obligated to churn out an endless stream of trivial corrections by someone motivated to comb through your entire portfolio and point out every little thing you did imperfectly, ever.</p>
<p>I wondered if maybe, in Scott or Eliezer's mental universe, I was a blameworthy (or pitiably mentally ill) nitpicker for flipping out over a blog post from 2014 (!) and some Tweets (!!) from November. I, too, had probably said things that were wrong <em>five years ago</em>.</p>
<p>But I thought I had made a pretty convincing case that a lot of people were making a correctable and important rationality mistake, such that the cost of a correction (about the philosophy of language specifically, not any possible implications for gender politics) would be justified here. As Ben pointed out, if someone had put this much effort into pointing out an error <em>I</em> had made four months or five years ago and making careful arguments for why it was important to get the right answer, I probably <em>would</em> put some serious thought into it.</p>
<p>I could see a case that it was unfair of me to include political subtext and then only expect people to engage with the politically clean text, but if we weren't going to get into full-on gender-politics on <em>Less Wrong</em> (which seemed like a bad idea), but gender politics <em>was</em> motivating an epistemology error, I wasn't sure what else I was supposed to do. I was pretty constrained here!</p>
<p>(I did regret having accidentally poisoned the well the previous month by impulsively sharing <a href="/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/">"Blegg Mode"</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode">as a <em>Less Wrong</em> linkpost</a>. "Blegg Mode" had originally been drafted as part of "... To Make Predictions" before getting spun off as a separate post. Frustrated in March at our failing email campaign, I thought it was politically "clean" enough to belatedly share, but it proved to be insufficiently <a href="/tag/deniably-allegorical/">deniably allegorical</a>, as evidenced by the 60-plus-entry trainwreck of a comments section. It's plausible that some portion of the <em>Less Wrong</em> audience would have been more receptive to "... Boundaries?" if they hadn't been alerted to the political context by the comments on the "Blegg Mode" linkpost.)</p>
<p>On 13 April 2019, I pulled the trigger on publishing "... Boundaries?", and wrote to Yudkowsky again, a fourth time (!), asking if he could either publicly endorse the post, <em>or</em> publicly comment on what he thought the post got right and what he thought it got wrong—and that if engaging on this level was too expensive for him in terms of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory">spoons</a>, if there was any action I could take to somehow make it less expensive. The reason I thought this was important, I explained, was that if rationalists in <a href="https://srconstantin.github.io/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies.html">good standing</a> find themselves in a persistent disagreement about rationality itself, that seemed like a major concern for <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes">our common interest</a>, something we should be eager to definitively settle in public (or at least clarify the current state of the disagreement). In the absence of a rationality court of last resort, I feared the closest thing we had was an appeal to Eliezer Yudkowsky's personal judgment. Despite the context in which the dispute arose, <em>this wasn't a political issue</em>. The post I was asking for his comment on was <em>just</em> about the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws">mathematical laws</a> governing how to talk about, <em>e.g.</em>, dolphins. We had nothing to be afraid of here. (Subject: "movement to clarity; or, rationality court filing").</p>
<p>I got some pushback from Ben and Jessica about claiming that this wasn't "political". What I meant by that was to emphasize (again) that I didn't expect Yudkowsky or "the community" to take a public stance <em>on gender politics</em>. Rather, I was trying to get "us" to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics that are unsafe, but that's <em>more inferential steps</em>. And I guess I didn't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps?</p>
<p>Anyway, again without revealing any content from the other side of any private conversations that may or may not have occurred, we did not get any public engagement from Yudkowsky.</p>
<p>It seemed that the Category War was over, and we lost.</p>
<p>We <em>lost?!</em> How could we <em>lose?!</em> The philosophy here was clear-cut. This <em>shouldn't</em> be hard or expensive or difficult to clear up. I could believe that Alexander was "honestly" confused, but Yudkowsky?</p>
<p>I could see how, under ordinary circumstances, asking Yudkowsky to weigh in on my post would be inappropriately demanding of a Very Important Person's time, given that an ordinary programmer such as me was surely as a mere <em>worm</em> in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky. (I would have humbly given up much sooner if I hadn't gotten social proof from Michael and Ben and Sarah and "Riley" and Jessica.)</p>
<p>But the only reason for my post to exist was because it would be even <em>more</em> inappropriately demanding to ask for a clarification in the original gender-political context. The economist Thomas Schelling (of "Schelling point" fame) once wrote about the use of clever excuses to help one's negotiating counterparty release themself from a prior commitment: "One must seek [...] a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."<sup id="fnref:schelling"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:schelling">10</a></sup> This is what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement or endorsement of "... Boundaries?" By making the post be about dolphins, I was trying to deny myself too great of a reward on the gender-politics front. I <em>don't</em> think it was inappropriately demanding to expect "us" (him) to be correct about the cognitive function of categorization. I was trying to be as accommodating as I could, short of just letting him (us?) be wrong.</p>
<p>I would have expected him to see why we had to make a stand <em>here</em>, where the principles of reasoning that made it possible for words to be assigned interpretations at all were under threat.</p>
<p>A hill of validity in defense of meaning.</p>
<p>Maybe that's not how politics works? Could it be that, somehow, the mob-punishment mechanisms that weren't smart enough to understand the concept of "bad argument (categories are arbitrary) for a true conclusion (trans people are OK)", <em>were</em> smart enough to connect the dots between my broader agenda and my abstract philosophy argument, such that VIPs didn't think they could endorse my philosophy argument, without it being construed as an endorsement of me and my detailed heresies?</p>
<p>Jessica mentioned talking with someone about me writing to Yudkowsky and Alexander about the category boundary issue. This person described having a sense that I should have known it wouldn't work—because of the politics involved, not because I wasn't right. I thought Jessica's takeaway was poignant:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Should</em> I have known that it wouldn't work? Didn't I "already know", at some level?</p>
<p>I guess in retrospect, the outcome does seem kind of obvious—that it should have been possible to predict in advance, and to make the corresponding update without so much fuss and wasting so many people's time.</p>
<p>But it's only "obvious" if you take as a given that Yudkowsky is playing a savvy Kolmogorov complicity strategy like any other public intellectual in the current year.</p>
<p>Maybe this seems banal if you haven't spent your entire adult life in his robot cult. From anyone else in the world, I wouldn't have had a problem with the "hill of meaning in defense of validity" thread—I would have respected it as a solidly above-average philosophy performance before <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to">setting the bozo bit</a> on the author and getting on with my day. But since I <em>did</em> spend my entire adult life in Yudkowsky's robot cult, trusting him the way a Catholic trusts the Pope, I <em>had</em> to assume that it was an "honest mistake" in his rationality lessons, and that honest mistakes could be honestly corrected if someone put in the effort to explain the problem. The idea that Eliezer Yudkowsky was going to behave just as badly as any other public intellectual in the current year was not really in my hypothesis space.</p>
<p>Ben shared the account of our posse's email campaign with someone who commented that I had "sacrificed all hope of success in favor of maintaining his own sanity by CC'ing you guys." That is, if I had been brave enough to confront Yudkowsky by myself, maybe there was some hope of him seeing that the game he was playing was wrong. But because I was so cowardly as to need social proof (because I believed that an ordinary programmer such as me was as a mere worm in the presence of the great Eliezer Yudkowsky), it probably just looked to him like an illegible social plot originating from Michael.</p>
<p>One might wonder why this was such a big deal to us. Okay, so Yudkowsky had prevaricated about his own philosophy of language for political reasons, and he couldn't be moved to clarify even after we spent an enormous amount of effort trying to explain the problem. So what? Aren't people wrong on the internet all the time?</p>
<p>This wasn't just anyone being wrong on the internet. In <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/">an essay on the development of cultural traditions</a>, Scott Alexander had written that rationalism is the belief that Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph. To no small extent, I and many other people had built our lives around a story that portrayed Yudkowsky as almost uniquely sane—a story that put MIRI, CfAR, and the "rationalist community" at the center of the universe, the ultimate fate of the cosmos resting on our individual and collective mastery of the hidden Bayesian structure of cognition.</p>
<p>But my posse and I had just falsified to our satisfaction the claim that Yudkowsky was currently sane in the relevant way. Maybe <em>he</em> didn't think he had done anything wrong (because he <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly">hadn't strictly lied</a>), and probably a normal person would think we were making a fuss about nothing, but as far as we were concerned, the formerly rightful caliph had relinquished his legitimacy. A so-called "rationalist" community that couldn't clarify this matter of the cognitive function of categories was a sham. Something had to change if we wanted a place in the world for the spirit of "naïve" (rather than politically savvy) inquiry to survive.</p>
<p>(To be continued. Yudkowsky would <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228">eventually clarify his position on the philosophy of categorization in September 2020</a>—but the story leading up to that will have to wait for another day.)</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:auto-race-analogy">
<p>Similarly, in automobile races, you want rules to enforce that all competitors have the same type of car, for some commonsense operationalization of "the same type", because a race between a sports car and a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped">moped</a> would be mostly measuring who has the sports car, rather than who's the better racer. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:auto-race-analogy" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:sports-case-is-funny">
<p>And in the case of sports, the facts are so lopsided that if we must find humor in the matter, it really goes the other way. A few years later, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_Thomas">Lia Thomas</a> would dominate an NCAA women's swim meet by finishing <a href="https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405"><em>4.2 standard deviations</em></a> (!!) earlier than the median competitor, and Eliezer Yudkowsky feels obligated to <em>pretend not to see the problem?</em> You've got to admit, that's a <em>little</em> bit funny. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:sports-case-is-funny" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:pseudonymous-then">
<p>Despite my misgivings, <a href="/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/">this blog <em>was</em> still published under a pseudonym</a> at the time; it would have been hypocritical of me to accuse someone of cowardice about what they're willing to attach their real name to. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:pseudonymous-then" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:kolmogorov-pun">
<p>The title was a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity">pun</a> referencing computer scientist Scott Aaronson's post advocating <a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376">"The Kolmogorov Option"</a>, serving the cause of Truth by cultivating a bubble that focuses on specific truths that won't get you in trouble with the local political authorities. Named after the Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, who knew better than to pick fights he couldn't win. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:kolmogorov-pun" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:atlas-shrugged-ref">
<p>In Part One, Chapter VII, "The Exploiters and the Exploited". <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:atlas-shrugged-ref" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:what-is-cfar">
<p>CfAR had been spun off from MIRI in 2012 as a dedicated organization for teaching rationality. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:what-is-cfar" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:overcoming-bias">
<p>Yudkowsky's Sequences (except the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pvim9PZJ6qHRTMqD3">last</a>) had originally been published on <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/"><em>Overcoming Bias</em></a> before the creation of <em>Less Wrong</em> in early 2009. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:overcoming-bias" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:breakup-songs">
<p>In general, I'm proud of my careful choices of breakup songs. For another example, my breakup song <a href="/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/">with institutionalized schooling</a> was Taylor Swift's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64">"We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"</a>, a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/">bad</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/">relationships</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/">with</a> <a href="https://www.ucsc.edu/">UC Santa Cruz</a> (2006–2007), <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College">Heald College</a> (2008), <a href="https://www.dvc.edu/">Diablo Valley College</a> (2010–2012), and <a href="https://www.sfsu.edu/">San Francisco State University</a> (2012–2013).</p>
<p>The fact that I've invested so much symbolic significance in carefully-chosen songs by female vocalists to mourn relationships with abstract perceived institutional authorities, and conspicuously <em>not</em> for any relationships with <em>actual women</em>, maybe tells you something about how my life has gone. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:breakup-songs" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:trans-power-gradient">
<p>Probably a lot of <em>other</em> people who lived in Berkeley would find it harder to criticize trans people than to criticize some privileged white guy named Yudkowski or whatever. But those weren't the relevant power gradients in <em>my</em> world. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:trans-power-gradient" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:schelling">
<p><em>The Strategy of Conflict</em>, Ch. 2, "An Essay on Bargaining" <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:schelling" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer2023-07-08T10:50:00-07:002023-07-08T10:50:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-07-08:/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/<blockquote>
<p>I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly be the first time I've found myself in the vulnerable position of sharing the brain-damaged prophet's impairment, down to the last neuron.</p>
<p>—<em>Quarantine</em> by Greg Egan</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a previous post, <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"</a>, I told the story about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these Sequences of blog posts about how reasoning works by someone named Eliezer Yudkowsky—where one <em>particularly</em> influential-to-me post was <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">the one that explained</a> why fantasies of changing sex are much easier said than done, <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard">because the tantalizingly short English phrase doesn't capture the complex implementation details of the real physical universe</a>.</p>
<p>At the time, this was my weird personal thing, which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about. In particular, I didn't think of myself as being "transgender." The whole time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych, and doing various things with my social presentation to try to seem not-masculine—sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials">trying to use my initials as a name</a>—I had been assuming that my gender problems were not the same as those of people who were actually transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose <a href="https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports">"internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"</a>, whereas my thing was obviously at least partially an outgrowth of my weird sex fantasy. I had never interpreted the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender."</p>
<p><em>Why would I?</em> In the English of my youth, "gender" was understood as a euphemism for <em>sex</em> for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity between <em>sex</em>-as-in-biological-sex and <em>sex</em>-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I'm not immune to this, either.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I <a href="/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/">used to</a> be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, <em>I am not delusional about</em>.</p>
<p>Okay, so trans people aren't delusional about their <a href="/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/">developmental sex</a>. Rather, the claim is that their internal sense of their own gender should take precedence. So where does that leave me? In <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism ..."</a>, I wrote about my <em>own</em> experiences. I <em>mentioned</em> transgenderedness a number of times, but I tried to cast it as an explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I said is consistent with Ray Blanchard being dumb and wrong when he coined "autogynephilia" (sometimes abbreviated as <em>AGP</em>) as the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals—a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes <em>actual</em> trans women. That's the world I thought I lived in for ten years after <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">encountering the obvious and perfect word</a>.</p>
<p>My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first clue. In retrospect, there were lots of <em>clues</em>. My first wake-up call.) In <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228">a 26 March 2016 Facebook post</a>, he wrote—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...</p>
<p>Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>(!?!?!?!?)</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <a href="https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans">https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans</a> and <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/">https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reading that post, I did realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises"—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" characterization, coming from the guy who taught me <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard">how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is</a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a <em>hell</em> of a lot of people who come out as trans.</p>
<p>If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5–10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Indeed—here we are over seven years later, and I am panicking.<sup id="fnref:panic"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:panic">1</a></sup> As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good">taught me</a>, and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative">panicking</a> <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html">sideways</a> in cases like this, where the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.</p>
<p>At the time, this was merely <em>very confusing</em>. I left <a href="/images/facebook_etle_comment.png">a careful comment in the Facebook thread</a>, quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could be thinking.</p>
<p>A casual friend I'll call "Thomas"<sup id="fnref:quoted-pseudonyms"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:quoted-pseudonyms">2</a></sup> messaged me, complimenting me on my comment.</p>
<p>"Thomas" was a fellow old-time <em>Less Wrong</em> reader I had met back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"<sup id="fnref:internship"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:internship">3</a></sup> for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.<sup id="fnref:siai"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:siai">4</a></sup></p>
<p>Relevantly, "Thomas" was also autogynephilic (and aware of it, under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.</p>
<p><a id="confided-to-thomas"></a>As it happened, I had messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth<sup id="fnref:twenty-sixth"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:twenty-sixth">5</a></sup> because the dating market was looking hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.</p>
<p>(I didn't <em>have sex</em> with her, obviously. <em>That</em> would be unethical.<sup id="fnref:unethical"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:unethical">6</a></sup>)</p>
<p>He had agreed that seeing escorts is ethical—arguably more ethical than casual sex. In the last few years, he had gotten interested in politics and become more socially and sexually conservative. "Free love is a lie," he said, noting that in a more traditional Society, our analogues would probably be married with kids by now.</p>
<p>Also, his gender dysphoria had receded. "At a certain point, I just cut my hair, give away a lot of clothes, and left it behind. I kept waiting to regret it ... but the regret never came," he said. "It's like my brain got pushed off the fence and subtly re-wired."</p>
<p>I had said that I was happy for him and respected him, even while my own life remained pro-dysphoria, pro-ponytails, and anti-politics.</p>
<p>"Thomas" said that he thought Yudkowsky's post was irresponsible because virtually all of the men in Yudkowsky's audience with gender dysphoria were probably autogynephilic. He went on:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To get a little paranoid, I think the power to define other people's identities is extremely useful in politics. If a political coalition can convince you that you have a persecuted identity or sexuality and it will support you, then it owns you for life, and can conscript you for culture wars and elections. Moloch would never pass up this level of power, so that means a constant stream of bad philosophy about identity and sexuality (like trans theory).</p>
<p>So when I see Eliezer trying to convince nerdy men that they are actually women, I see the hand of Moloch.<sup id="fnref:moloch"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:moloch">7</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>We chatted for a few more minutes. I noted <a href="/images/burja-shape_of_the_moral_panic.png">Samo Burja's comment</a> on Yudkowsky's post as a "terrible thought" that had also occurred to me: Burja had written that the predicted moral panic may not be along the expected lines, if an explosion of MtFs were to result in trans women dominating previously sex-reserved spheres of social competition. "[F]or signaling reasons, I will not give [the comment] a Like", I added parenthetically.<sup id="fnref:signaling-reasons"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:signaling-reasons">8</a></sup></p>
<p><a id="correct-side-of-the-tunnel"></a>A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek to an apartment on the correct side of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel">Caldecott tunnel</a>, in Berkeley, closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.</p>
<p>(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)</p>
<p>While I was waiting for internet service to be connected in my new apartment, I read a paper copy of <em>Nevada</em> by Imogen Binnie. It's about a trans woman in who steals her girlfriend's car to go on a cross-country road trip, and ends up meeting an autogynephilic young man whom she tries to convince that <em>autogynephilia</em> is a bogus concept and that he's actually trans.</p>
<p>In Berkeley, I met interesting people who seemed similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life—much like how the characters in <em>Nevada</em> immediately recognize each other as similar but different. (I saw where Yudkowsky got that 20% figure from.)</p>
<p>This prompted me to do more reading in corners of the literature that I had heard of, but hadn't taken seriously in my twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/"><em>On the Science of Changing Sex</em></a>, was especially helpful.)</p>
<p>Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became increasingly persuaded that Blanchard <em>wasn't</em> dumb and wrong—that his taxonomy of male-to-female transsexuality is <em>basically</em> correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this story has been about <em>my</em> experience, not anyone's theory of transsexuality (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.</p>
<p>(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">a lot to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean</a>, but I need a few paragraphs to first talk about the simple version of the theory that makes pretty good predictions on average, as a prerequisite for more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)</p>
<p><a id="explaining-the-taxonomy"></a>The theory was put forth by Blanchard in a series of journal articles in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, and popularized <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen#Negative_reactions">(to some controversy)</a> by J. Michael Bailey in the popular-level book <em>The Man Who Would Be Queen</em>. The idea is that male-to-female transsexuality isn't one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't have anything to do with each other, except for the potential treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)</p>
<p>In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, <em>&c.</em>) since to early childhood, in a way that causes social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. Blanchard called them "homosexual transsexuals", which is sometimes abbreviated as <em>HSTS</em>. That's where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/">This one probably <em>is</em> a brain-intersex condition.</a></p>
<p>That story is pretty intuitive. Were an alien AI to be informed that, among humans, some fraction of males elect to undergo medical interventions to resemble females and be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis, just on priors.</p>
<p>But suppose our alien AI were to be informed that many of the human males seeking to become female do not fit the clinical profile of the early-onset type: it looks like there's a separate "late-onset" type or types, of males who didn't exhibit discordantly sex-atypical behavior in childhood, but later reported a desire to change sex. If you <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTyuQ3cgsPjifr7oj/faster-than-science">didn't have enough data to <em>prove</em> anything, but you had to guess</a>, what would be your second hypothesis for how this desire might arise?</p>
<p>What's the <em>usual</em> reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?</p>
<p>Basically, I think a substantial majority of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were <em>less self-aware about what the thing actually is</em>. It's not an innate gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's <em>surprisingly easy to misinterpret</em> as a gender identity.</p>
<p>I realize this is an inflammatory and (far more importantly) surprising claim. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I possibly have the arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?</p>
<p>Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one exhibit, in April 2018, the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/">/r/MtF subreddit</a>, which then had over 28,000 subscribers, <a href="https://archive.is/uswsz">posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation 'fetish' (or similar) before you realized you were trans?"</a>. The <a href="https://archive.is/lm4ro">results</a>: <a href="/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png">82% of over 2000 respondents said Yes</a>. <a href="https://archive.is/c7YFG">Top comment in the thread</a>, with over 230 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp."</p>
<p>Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as an axiom and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing">actually look</a> at what people say and do, these kinds of observations are not hard to find. You could <a href="https://archive.is/ezENv">fill an entire subreddit with them</a> (and then move it to <a href="https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish">independent</a> <a href="https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/">platforms</a> when the original gets <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/">banned for "promoting hate"</a>).</p>
<p>Reddit isn't scientific enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. <a href="/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf">Blanchard 1985</a>: 73% of not exclusively androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (A lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-<em>dressing</em>, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes; Jack Molay coined the term <a href="https://www.crossdreamers.com/"><em>crossdreaming</em></a>, which seems more apt.) <a href="/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf">Lawrence 2005</a>: of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. <a href="/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf">Smith <em>et al.</em> 2005</a>: 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) <a href="/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf">Nuttbrock <em>et al.</em> 2011</a>: lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/">Kay Brown's blog</a>, Phil Illy's book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C62L2GJW"><em>Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Opposite Sex</em></a>, or the first two chapters of <a href="https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf">Anne Lawrence's <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism</em></a>.)</p>
<p>Peer-reviewed scientific papers aren't enough for you? (They could be cherry-picked; there are lots of scientific journals, and no doubt a lot of bad science slips through the cracks of the review process.) Want something more indicative of a consensus among practitioners? Fine. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5"><em>Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition</em></a>, the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association, <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/american-psychiatric-association-supports-the-two-type-transsexual-taxonomy/">says the same thing</a> in <a href="/papers/DSM-V-gender_dysphoria_section.pdf">its section on gender dysphoria</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. <em>Early-onset gender dysphoria</em> starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. <em>Late-onset gender dysphoria</em> occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria <strong>frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Bolding mine.)</p>
<p>Or consider Anne Vitale's <a href="https://www.avitale.com/essays-details/?name=the-gender-variant-phenomenon--a-developmental-review-5">"The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"</a>, which makes the same observations as Blanchard and friends, and arrives at the same two-type taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Got that? They <em>often combine excessive masturbation</em> with an <em>increase in secret cross-dressing activity</em> to <em>release anxiety</em>—their terrible, terrible <em>gender expression deprivation anxiety!</em></p>
<p>Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">not clinicians</a>.) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!</p>
<p>Consider these excerpts from economist Deirdre McCloskey's memoir <em>Crossing</em>, written in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53 (bolding mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: <em>About five thousand episodes</em>. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. <strong>Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's <em>Whipping Girl</em> (I know I <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">keep</a> <a href="/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/">referencing</a> <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#whipping-girl">this</a> book, but it's <em>so representative</em> of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic">Fridge Logic</a> of the all <a href="/2016/Sep/apophenia/">the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007</a>):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is not an experience; it's a hypothesis about psychology, about the <em>causes</em> of the experience. I <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">don't expect anyone to be able to get that sort of thing right from introspection alone!</a></p>
<p>Or consider <em>Nevada</em>. This was a popular book, nominated for a 2014 Lambda Literary Award—and described by the author as an attempt to write a story about trans women for an audience of trans women. In Part 2, Chapter 23, our protagonist, Maria, rants about the self-evident falsehood and injustice of autogynephilia theory. And she starts out by ... acknowledging the phenomenon which the theory is meant to explain:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But the only time I couldn't lie to myself about who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to be, and like, the way I needed to exist in the world if I was going to actually exist in the world, is when I was jacking off.</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>I was thinking about being a girl while I jacked off, she says, Like, as soon as I started jacking off. For years I thought it was because I was a pervert, that I had this kink I must never, ever tell anyone about, right?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If the idea that most non-androphilic trans women are guys like me is so preposterous, then <em>why do people keep recommending this book?</em></p>
<p>I could go on ... but do I need to? After having seen enough of these laughable denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become less, "Is the two-type androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexuality approximately true?" (answer: yes, obviously) and more, "How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?" (answer: very, but correctly).</p>
<p>An important caveat: <a href="/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/">different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same <em>descriptive</em> taxonomy.</a> You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown <em>enough</em> work here, that the reader can empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?</p>
<p>Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a <em>design</em>. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor is going to ask followup questions to pin down whether it's a stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact <em>that</em> my ankle hurts, but I can easily be wrong about <em>why</em> my ankle hurts.</p>
<p>Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question I need to answer is, Do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly different psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, but (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?</p>
<p>The <em>safe</em> answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on <em>that</em> much, we can agree.</p>
<p>How weaselly am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not <em>more</em> weaselly than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge our civilization has managed to accumulate.</p>
<p>Psychology is complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique <em>maximum-entropy</em> snowflake; you can't make <em>any</em> probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to verbally endorse something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to make predictions about people's behavior using some algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is instinct bequeathed by natural selection (because predicting the behavior of conspecifics was useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons.</p>
<p>There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not perfect, but as good as our theories about how to engineer bridges) would be described by (say) a 70-node <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models">causal graph</a>, but that some of <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/">the more important variables in the graph anti-correlate with each other</a>. Humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, still manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype exactly, but <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions">the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions</a> like <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/">"comas"</a> or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".<sup id="fnref:lucky-simplification"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:lucky-simplification">9</a></sup></p>
<p><a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">I claim that femininity and autogynephilia are two such anti-correlated nodes in the True Causal Graph</a>. They're negatively correlated because they're both children of the sexual orientation node, whose value pushes them in <em>opposite directions</em>: gay men are more feminine than straight men,<sup id="fnref:gay-femininity"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:gay-femininity">10</a></sup> and autogynephiles want to be women because we're straight.</p>
<p>Sex-atypical behavior and the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought are two different reasons why transition might seem like a good idea to someone—different paths through the causal graph leading the decision to transition. Maybe they're not mutually exclusive, and no doubt there are lots of other contributing factors, such that an overly strict interpretation of the two-type taxonomy is false. If an individual trans woman swears that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but <em>also</em> doesn't empathize with the experiences I've grouped under "autogynephilia", I don't have any proof with which to accuse her of lying, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/">the fuzzy low-resolution model is <em>way too good</em></a> not to be pointing to <em>some</em> regularity in the real world, and honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, should notice how well it performs on the <em>non</em>-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity"><em>magical</em> is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood</a>) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist">you should be confused</a> by the 230 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp. If the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they single out "it's probably just a fetish" <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis">as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place</a>? And there's a whole "camp" of these people?!</p>
<p>I <em>do</em> have a lot of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what <em>other</em> factors influence people's decision to transition, including <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">incentives</a> and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?</p>
<p><a id="internalized-misandry"></a>In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry. I remember one night at the University in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions—in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were <em>always morally wrong</em>—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that <em>men are terrible</em>.</p>
<p>Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's <a href="https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664">account</a> that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."</p>
<p>Or there's a piece that has made the rounds on social media more than once: <a href="https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42">"I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"</a>, which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even <em>want</em> to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"</p>
<p>(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" phrasing in the current revision is telling; <a href="https://archive.is/trslp">the originally published version</a> said "when they find out I'm a girl".)<sup id="fnref:not-coming-out-revisions"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:not-coming-out-revisions">11</a></sup></p>
<p>If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they say they're a girl, that provides an incentive <a href="https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html">on the margin</a> to disidentify with maleness.</p>
<p>This culturally transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic">ego-syntonic</a> beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, and plausibly be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.</p>
<p>In one of my notebooks from 2008, I had written, "It bothers me that Richard Feynman went to strip clubs. <em>I wish Richard Feynman had been trans.</em>" I guess the sentiment was that male sexuality is inherently exploitative and Bad, but being trans is morally pure and Good; I wanted Famous Science Raconteur to be Good rather than Bad.</p>
<p>But the <em>reason</em> strip clubs are considered Bad is the same as the reason single-sex locker rooms, hospital wards, <em>&c.</em> were, until recently, considered an obvious necessity: no woman should be forced to undergo the indignity of being exposed in the presence of men. It would have been <em>more</em> scandalous if Feynman had violated the sanctity of women's spaces. Is it supposed to be an <em>improvement</em> if physics-nerd incels who might have otherwise gone to strip clubs, instead declare themselves women? Why? Who is the misandry helping, exactly? Or rather, I could maybe see a case for the misandry serving some useful functions, but not if you're allowed to self-identify out of it.</p>
<p>To the extent it's common for "cognitive" things like internalized misandry to manifest as cross-gender identification, then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not otherwise specified": the early-onset type is behaviorally distinct and has a straightforward motive to transition (in some ways, it would be <em>more</em> weird not to). In contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from <em>other</em> sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.</p>
<p>Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like, I think I have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream <a href="https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/">"inner sense of gender"</a> story.</p>
<p>The public narrative about transness is obviously, <em>obviously</em> false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you there.</p>
<p>Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. Now I knew the public narrative was obviously false, and I had the outlines of a better theory, though <a href="/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/">I didn't pretend to know what the social policy implications were</a>. All I <em>should</em> have had to do was carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments were so much better, all the intellectually serious people would either agree with me (in public), or be eager to clarify (in public) exactly where they disagreed and what their alternative theory was so that we could move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to advance the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.</p>
<p>Of course, this is a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a lot of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public <em>for ourselves</em>.</p>
<p>(It later turned out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake, but I didn't realize this at the time.)</p>
<p>Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? <em>Telling the difference between fantasy and reality</em> is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to use medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that <em>she</em> is obviously the correct pronoun for people who <em>look</em> like women—it's going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!</p>
<p>I think most people in roughly my situation (of harboring these gender feelings for many years, thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", and later discovering that it's <em>not</em> obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they were "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces of cisnormativity that let them ever doubt.</p>
<p>I ... <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Modus">went the other direction</a>. In slogan form: "Holy crap, <em>almost no one</em> is actually trans!"</p>
<p>Okay, that slogan isn't right. I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom. If someone wants to change sex, that's a valid desire that Society should try to accommodate as much as feasible given currently existing technology. In that sense, anyone can <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/"><em>choose</em> to</a> become trans.</p>
<p>The problem is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be about making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accommodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.</p>
<p>Okay, but what does that <em>mean</em>? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">get it right the first time</a>? How could I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!</p>
<p>My shift in belief, from thinking the standard narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie, happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up—from my reading, from correspondence with the aforementioned <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/">Kay Brown</a>—and also as I kept initiating conversations with local trans women to try to figure out what was going on.</p>
<p>Someone I met at the Berkeley <em>Less Wrong</em> meetup who went by Ziz<sup id="fnref:ziz-privacy"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ziz-privacy">12</a></sup> denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her—but it seems worth noting that Ziz was unusual along a lot of dimensions. Again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict <em>every</em> case to be broadly useful for understanding the world.</p>
<p>In contrast, many of the people I talked to seemed to report similar experiences to me (at least, to the low resolution of the conversation; I wasn't going to press people for the specific details of their sexual fantasies) but seemed to me to be either pretty delusional, or privately pretty sane but oddly indifferent to the state of public knowledge.</p>
<p>One trans woman told me that autogynephilia is a typical element of cis woman sexuality. (This, I had learned, was a <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/">standard cope</a>, but one I have <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#am-i-supposed-to-claim">never found remotely plausible</a>.) She told me that if I don't feel like a boy, I'm probably not one. (Okay, but again, <em>what does that mean?</em> There needs to be some underlying truth condition for that "probably" to <em>point to</em>. If it's not sex and it's not sex-atypical behavior, then what is it?)</p>
<p>Another wrote a comment in one discussion condemning "autogynephilia discourse" and expressing skepticism at the idea that someone would undergo a complete medical and social transition because of a fetish: it might be <em>possible</em>, she admitted, but it must be extremely rare. Elsewhere on the internet, the same person reported being into and aroused by gender-bender manga at the time she was first seriously questioning her gender identity.</p>
<p>Was it rude of me to confront her on the contradiction in her PMs? Yes, it was extremely rude. All else being equal, I would prefer not to probe into other people's private lives and suggest that they're lying to themselves. But when they lie to the public, that affects <em>me</em>, and my attempts to figure out my life. Is it a conscious political ploy, I asked her, or are people really unable to entertain the hypothesis that their beautiful pure self-identity feelings are causally related to the fetish? If it was a conscious political ploy, <a href="/2016/Nov/new-clothes/">I wished someone would just say, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret, now keep quiet about it or else,"</a> rather than trying to <em>undermine my connection to reality</em>.</p>
<p>She said that she had to deal with enough invalidation already, that she had her own doubts and concerns but would only discuss them with people who shared her views. Fair enough—I'm not entitled to talk to anyone who doesn't want to talk to me.</p>
<p>I gave someone else a copy of <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism</em>. She didn't like it—which I would have respected, if her complaint had just been that Lawrence was overconfident and overgeneralizing, as a factual matter of science and probability. But my acquaintance seemed more preoccupied with how the book was "seemingly deliberately hurtful and disrespectful", using "inherently invalidating language that is very often used in people's dismissal, abuse, and violence towards trans folk", such as calling MtF people "men", referring to straight trans women as "homosexual", and using "transgendered" instead of "transgender". (I would have hoped that the fact that Lawrence is trans and (thinks she) is describing herself would have been enough to make it credible that she didn't mean any harm by saying "men" instead of "a.m.a.b."—and that it should have been obvious that if you reject authors out of hand for not speaking in your own ideology's shibboleths, you lose an important chance to discover if your ideology is getting something wrong.)</p>
<p>The privately sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one trans woman told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."</p>
<p>Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism">TERFy</a> and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."</p>
<p>Someone else I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."</p>
<hr>
<p>I made friends with a trans woman whom I'll call "Helen." My flatmate and I let her crash at our apartment for a few weeks while she was looking for more permanent housing.</p>
<p>There's a certain—dynamic, that can exist between self-aware autogynephilic men, and trans women who are obviously in the same taxon (even if they don't self-identify as such). From the man's end, a mixture of jealousy and brotherly love and a blackmailer's smugness, twisted together in the unspoken assertion, "Everyone else is supposed to politely pretend you're a woman born in the wrong body, but <em>I know the secret</em>."</p>
<p>And from the trans woman's end—I'm not sure. Maybe pity. Maybe the blackmail victim's fear.</p>
<p>One day, "Helen" mentioned having executive-dysfunction troubles about making a necessary telephone call to the doctor's office. The next morning, I messaged her:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I asked my counterfactual friend Zelda how/whether I should remind you to call the doctor in light of our conversation yesterday. "If she was brave enough to self-actualize in the first place rather than cowardly resign herself to a lifetime of dreary servitude to the cistem," she said counterfactually, "—unlike <em>some</em> people I could name—", she added, counterfactually glaring at me, "then she's definitely brave enough to call the doctor at some specific, predetermined time today, perhaps 1:03 p.m."</p>
<p>"The 'vow to call at a specific time' thing never works for me when I'm nervous about making a telephone call," I said. The expression of contempt on her counterfactual face was withering. "Obviously the technique doesn't work for <em>boys</em>!"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I followed up at 1:39 <em>p.m.</em>, while I was at my dayjob:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"And then at one-thirty or so, you message her saying, 'There, that wasn't so bad, was it?' And if the call had already been made, it's an affirming comment, but if the call hadn't been made, it functions as a social incentive to actually call in order to be able to truthfully reply 'yeah' rather than admit to still being paralyzed by telephone anxiety."</p>
<p>"You always know what to do," I said. "Nothing like me. It's too bad you're only—" I began to say, just as she counterfactually said, "It's a good thing you're only a figment of my imagination."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>"Helen" replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>i'm in the middle of things. i'll handle it before they close at 5 though, definitely.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wrote back:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"I don't know," I murmured, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a <em>guy</em>. Males are basically <em>composed</em> of lies, as a consequence of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle</a>. Don't worry about ['Helen']."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or I remember one night we were talking in the living room. I think she was sad about something, and I said—</p>
<p>(I'm not saying I was <em>right</em> to say it; I'm admitting that I <em>did</em> say it)</p>
<p>—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No," and nothing happened.</p>
<p>I would have <em>never</em> said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was <em>staying at my house</em>. This was different, I felt. I had reason to believe that "Helen" was <em>like me</em>, and the reason it felt ethically okay to ask was because I was less afraid of hurting her—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably <em>wasn't there</em>.</p>
<hr>
<p><a id="explaining-agp"></a>I talked about my autogynephilia to a (cis) female friend over Messenger. It took some back-and-forth to explain the concept.</p>
<p>I had mentioned "misdirected heterosexuality"; she said, "Hm, so, like, you could date girls better if you were a girl?"</p>
<p>No, I said, it's weirder than that; the idea of having female anatomy oneself and being able to appreciate it from the first person is intrinsically more exciting than the mere third-person appreciation that you can do in real life as a man.</p>
<p>"[S]o, like, literal autogynephilia is a thing?" she said (as if she had heard the term before, but only as a slur or fringe theory, not as <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">the obvious word for an obviously existing thing</a>).</p>
<p>She mentioned that as a data point, <em>her</em> only effective sex fantasy was her as a hot girl. I said that I expected that to be a qualitatively different phenomenon, based on priors, and—um, details that it would <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories">probably be creepy to talk about</a>.</p>
<p>So, she asked, I believed that AGP was a real thing, and in my case, I didn't have lots of desires to be seen as a girl, have a girl name, <em>&c.</em>?</p>
<p>No, I said, I did; it just seemed like it couldn't have been a coincidence that my <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity">beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing</a> (the class of things including the hope that my beautiful–beautiful ponytail successfully sets me apart from the guys who are proud of being guys, or feeling happy about getting <em>ma'am</em>'ed over the phone) didn't develop until <em>after</em> puberty.</p>
<p>She said, "hm. so male puberty was a thing you did not like."</p>
<p>No, I said, puberty was fine—it seemed like she was rounding off my self-report to something closer to the standard narrative, but what I was trying to say was that the standard was-always-a-girl-in-some-metaphysical-sense narrative was not true (at least for me, and I suspected for many others).</p>
<p>"The thing is, I don't think it's actually that uncommon!" I said, linking to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">"Changing Emotions"</a> (the post from Yudkowsky's Sequences explaining why this not-uncommon male fantasy would be technically difficult to fulfill). "It's just that there's no script for it and no one wants to talk about it!"</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>[redacted]</strong> — 09/02/2016 1:23 PM<br>
ok, <em>very</em> weird<br>
yeah, I just don't have a built-in empathic handle for "wants to be a woman."<br>
<strong>Zack M. Davis</strong> — 09/02/2016 1:24 PM<br>
it even has a TVTrope! <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman">http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman</a><br>
<strong>[redacted]</strong> — 09/02/2016 1:27 PM<br>
ok, yeah. wow. it's really just easier for my brain to go "ok, that's a girl" than to understand why anyone would want boobs </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I took this as confirmation of my expectation that alleged "autogynephilia" in women is mostly not a thing—that normal women appreciating their own bodies is a qualitatively distinct phenomenon. When she didn't know what I was talking about, my friend mentioned that she also fantasized about being a hot girl. After I went into more detail (and linked the TVTropes page), she said she didn't understand why anyone would want boobs. Well, why would she? But I think a lot of a.m.a.b. people understand.</p>
<hr>
<p>As the tension continued to mount through mid-2016 between what I was seeing and hearing, and the socially-acceptable public narrative, <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/">my</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/identity/">frustration</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/apostasy/">started</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/">to</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/">subtly</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/falself/">or</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/prescription/">not-so-much</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-world-by-gaslight/">leak</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-roark-quirrell-effect/">out</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/">into</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/">my</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/">existing</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-thing/">blog</a>, but I wanted to write more directly about what I thought was going on.</p>
<p>At first, I was imagining a post on <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/">my existing blog</a>, but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. I came up with "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" as a pen name and <a href="/2016/Sep/apophenia/">started this blog</a> (with <a href="/2020/Apr/dont-read-the-comments/">loving attention to technology choices, rather than just using WordPress</a>). I'm not entirely without misgivings about the exact naming choices I made, although I don't actively regret it the way I regret <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials">my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts</a>.<sup id="fnref:naming-choices"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:naming-choices">13</a></sup></p>
<p>The pseudonymity quickly became a joke—or rather, a mere differential-visibility market-segmentation pen name and not an Actually Secret pen name, like how everyone knows that Robert Galbraith is J. K. Rowling. It turned out that my need for openness and a unified social identity was far stronger than my grasp of what my very smart and cowardly friends think is prudence, such that I ended up frequently linking to and claiming ownership of the blog from my real name, <em>and</em> otherwise <a href="/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/">leaking</a> <a href="/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/">entropy</a> <a href="/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/">through</a> a sieve on this side.</p>
<p>I kept the Saotome-Westlake byline because, given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even <em>necessary</em>), I figured it was probably a smarter play if the <em>first</em> page of my real-name Google search results wasn't my gender <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/">and worse</a> heterodoxy blog. Plus, having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there were already a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I didn't want to throw away or rewrite that history. (The backwards-compatibility problem is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning.)</p>
<p>It's only now, just before publishing the first parts of this memoir telling my Whole Dumb Story, that <a href="/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/">I've decided to drop the pseudonym</a>—partially because this Whole Dumb Story is tied up in enough real-world drama that it would be dishonorable and absurd to keep up the charade of hiding my own True Name while speaking so frankly about other people, and partially because my financial situation has improved (and my timelines to transformative AI have deteriorated) to the extent that the risk of missing out on job opportunities due to open heterodoxy seems comparatively unimportant.</p>
<p>(As it happens, Andrea James's Transgender Map website <a href="https://archive.is/Vg8CK">mis-doxxed me as someone else</a>, so I guess the charade worked?)</p>
<hr>
<p>Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Not to actually socially <em>transition</em>, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just <a href="/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/">to try as a gender-themed drug experiment</a>. Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?</p>
<p>Sarah Constantin, a friend who once worked for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed">our local defunct medical research company</a> still offered lit reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do <a href="https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html">a post about the effects of feminizing hormone replacement therapy on males</a>, in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-consent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with my healthcare provider to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers (LCSW).</p>
<p>I was happy to sit through the sessions as standard procedure rather than <a href="https://diytrans.wiki/How_to_Begin_HRT">going DIY</a>, but I was preoccupied with how <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/"><em>everyone had been lying to me about the most important thing in my life for fourteen years</em></a> and the professionals were <em>in on it</em>, and spent a lot of the sessions ranting about that. I gave the psychologist and one of the LCSWs a copy of <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism</em>. (The psychologist said she wasn't allowed to accept gifts with a monetary value of over $25, so I didn't tell her it cost $40.)</p>
<p><a id="gender-clinic-notes"></a>I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years later, I was grateful to discover that the notes from the appointments were later made available to me via the provider's website <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/">(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks going forward)</a>; it's amusing to read about (for example) one of the LCSWs discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".</p>
<p>The reality was actually worse than my hostile summary that everyone was lying, and the professionals were in on it. <a href="/2016/new-clothes/">In some ways, it would be better</a> if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just have this whole paradigm of providing <a href="https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/">"equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"</a>. This is transparently garbage-tier epistemology (<a href="/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/">for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all</a>), but it's so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they're incapable of seeing someone not buying it, even when you state your objections very clearly.</p>
<p>Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist to express frustration about the culture of lying, noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability before starting the HRT experiment. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) She wrote back:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I replied:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is <em>exactly</em> what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonomy is <em>false</em>, you should <em>tell</em> me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! I distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT <em>without</em> socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services <em>not</em> on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.</p>
<p>However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I wanted to, I could cherry-pick from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever that means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a small child, I asked for (and received, because I had good '90s liberal parents) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket">Polly Pocket</a>, and a pink and purple girl's scooter with heart decals. I could talk about how <a href="/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/">sensitive</a> I am. I could go on about <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity">my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing</a> ...</p>
<p>But (as I told the LCSW) I would <em>know</em> that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effeminate <em>by others</em>. <a href="/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/">You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from <em>knowing</em> that you know.</a> That's not me. I <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose">don't even <em>want</em> that to be me</a>. I definitely have a gender <em>thing</em>, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing is in the physical universe, and my model doesn't fit in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report <em>wishing</em> I were female is the same thing as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away">crazy or a liar</a> to say it is.</p>
<p>I could sympathize with patients in an earlier era of trans healthcare who felt that they had no choice but to lie—to conform to the doctors' conception of a "true transsexual" on pain of being denied treatment.</p>
<p>This was not the situation I saw on the ground in the Bay Area of 2016. If a twentieth-century stalemate of patients lying to skeptical doctors had congealed into a culture of scripted conformity, why had it persisted long after the doctors stopped being skeptical and the lies served no remaining purpose? Why couldn't everyone just snap out of it?</p>
<hr>
<p>Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was my break with progressive morality. I had never really been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070531085902/http://www.reason.com/blog/">greater</a> <a href="https://praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm">libertarian</a> <a href="https://cafehayek.com/">blogosphere</a>.) But there was still an embedded assumption that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right (<em>i.e.</em>, left) side of history, <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/">the Blue Team and not the Red Team</a>.</p>
<p>Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of <a href="https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php">the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven</a>—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.</p>
<p><a id="unqualified-reservations"></a>Among many works I had skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet, was the neoreactionary blog <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/"><em>Unqualified Reservations</em></a>, by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The <em>Unqualified Reservations</em> archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.</p>
<p>Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/">an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients</a>; the Republicans, <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/">representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite</a>, can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long.</p>
<p>The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to control the public mind. If you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a <em>de facto</em> state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality" in order to sidestep the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause">Establishment Clause</a>. People within the system are indoctrinated into a Whig history which holds that people in the past were bad, bad men, but that we're so much more enlightened now in the progress of time. But the progress of time isn't sensitive to what's better; it only tracks what <em>won</em>.</p>
<p>Moldbug contends that the triumph of progressivism is bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance: it's not a coincidence that all functional <em>non</em>-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO<sup id="fnref:ceo-supervision"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ceo-supervision">14</a></sup> who has the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with <em>democracy</em>).</p>
<p>(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when <em>Unqualified Reservations</em> was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more credible after Trump and Brexit and the summer of George Floyd. I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day">National Coming Out Day</a>, my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)</p>
<p>In one part of his <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/"><em>Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations</em></a>, Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).</p>
<p>Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners. It's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners. Violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it. Nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners <em>qua</em> commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.</p>
<p>Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But beyond denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug furthermore claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects <em>on the beneficiaries themselves</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call <em>ignoble privilege</em> would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, <em>noblesse sans oblige</em> is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This was the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without putting any serious weight on it.</p>
<p>It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I don't know what it's like to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly <em>read blog posts</em> skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.</p>
<p>Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... straight boys who wished they were girls. And suddenly, <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/"><em>I had standing</em></a>.</p>
<p>When a political narrative is being pushed for <em>your</em> alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies. The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some <em>other</em> group is easy to dismiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to people like you. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the travails of Latinos, blacks, and women, I <em>know</em> that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we <em>weren't</em> that fragile, if anyone still remembered the world of 'aught-six, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that the fantasy wasn't real and didn't think the world owed us deference for our perversion. This <em>did</em> raise questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I noticed that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "<a href="https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/">Red Pill</a> is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)</p>
<hr>
<p>While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. ("I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"!)</p>
<p><a id="cheerful-price"></a>I wasn't <em>friends</em> with Yudkowsky, of course; I didn't have a natural social affordance to just ask him the way you would ask a dayjob or college acquaintance something. But he had posted about how he was willing to accept money to do things he otherwise wouldn't in exchange for enough money to feel happy about the trade—a Happy Price, or <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price">Cheerful Price, as the custom was later termed</a>—and his <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228">schedule of happy prices</a> listed $1,000 as the price for a 2-hour conversation. I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI a few years before, so on 29 September 2016, I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about what kind of massive update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality sometime between <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">January 2009</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228">March of the current year</a>, mentioning that I had been "feeling baffled and disappointed (although I shouldn't be) that the rationality community is getting this <em>really easy</em> scientific question wrong" (Subject: "Happy Price offer for a 2 hour conversation").</p>
<p><a id="cheerful-price-reasons"></a>At this point, any <em>normal people</em> who are (somehow?) reading this might be thinking, isn't that weird and kind of cultish? Some blogger you follow posted something you thought was strange earlier this year, and you want to pay him <em>one grand</em> to talk about it? To the normal person, I would explain thusly—</p>
<p>First, in our subculture, we don't have your weird hangups about money: people's time is valuable, and paying people money to use their time differently than they otherwise would is a perfectly ordinary thing for microeconomic agents to do. Upper-middle-class normal people don't blink at paying a licensed therapist $100 to talk for an hour, because their culture designates that as a special ritualized context in which paying money to talk to someone isn't weird. In my culture, we don't need the special ritualized context; Yudkowsky just had a higher rate than most therapists.</p>
<p>Second, $1000 isn't actually real money to a San Francisco software engineer.</p>
<p>Third—yes. Yes, it <em>absolutely</em> was kind of cultish. There's a sense in which, sociologically and psychologically speaking, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.</p>
<p>By this, I don't mean that the <em>content</em> of Yudkowskian rationalism is comparable to (say) Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a god or a divine (there is not), the features of human psychology that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active. <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/">If the God-shaped hole in my head can't not be filled by <em>something</em></a>, it's better to fill it with a "religion" <em>about good epistemology</em>, one that can reflect on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are often false. It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the canonical text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that <em>my</em> religion is <em>actually true</em> (and says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on faith).</p>
<p>That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing <em>Eliezer Yudkowsky</em> about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I <em>really</em> want to spend that on <em>this topic</em>?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe with many subjectively indistinguishable copies of everyone, including <a href="https://www.simulation-argument.com/">inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past</a>, there would plausibly be more copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)</p>
<p>I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclical">encyclical</a> seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it?</p>
<p>I don't think I should talk about the results of my cheerful-price inquiry (whether a conversation occured, or what was said if it did), because any conversation would be protected by the privacy rules that I'm holding myself to in telling this Whole Dumb Story.</p>
<p>(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies</em> into the MIRI office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)</p>
<hr>
<p>If I had to pick a date for my break with progressive morality, it would be 7 October 2017. Over the past few days, I had been having a frustrating Messenger conversation with some guy, which I would <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">later describe as feeling like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people</a>. He didn't even bother making his denials cohere with each other, insisting with minimal argument that my ideas were wrong <em>and</em> overconfident <em>and</em> irrelevant <em>and</em> harmful to talk about. When I exasperatedly pointed out that fantasizing about being a woman is not the same thing as literally already being a woman, he replied, "Categories were made for man, not man for the categories", referring to <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">a 2014 <em>Slate Star Codex</em> post</a> which argued that the inherent subjectivity of drawing category boundaries justified acceptance of trans people's identities.</p>
<p>Over the previous weeks and months, I had been frustrated with the <em>zeitgeist</em>, but I was trying to not to be loud or obnoxious about it, because I wanted to be a good person and not hurt anyone's feelings and not lose any more friends. ("Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she had said, "just find talking vaguely aversive.")</p>
<p>This conversation made it very clear to me that I could have no peace with the <em>zeitgeist</em>. It wasn't the mere fact that some guy in my social circle was being dumb and gaslighty about it. It was the fact that his performance was an unusually pure distillation of socially normative behavior in Berkeley 2016: there were more copies of him than there were of me.</p>
<p>Opposing this was worth losing friends, worth hurting feelings—and, actually, worth the other thing. I posted on Facebook in the morning and <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/">on my real-name blog</a> in the evening:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the moment of liberating clarity when you resolve the tension between being a good person and the requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore 💖</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Former MIRI president Michael Vassar emailed me about the Facebook post, and we ended up meeting once. (I had also emailed him back in August, when I had heard from my friend Anna Salamon that he was also skeptical of the transgender movement (Subject: "I've heard of fake geek girls, but this is ridiculous").)</p>
<hr>
<p>I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of <em>Slate Star Codex</em> fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result was that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/">November 2016 links post</a>. He <a href="https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i">got some pushback even for that</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>A trans woman named Sophia <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/#comment-250406">commented on one of my real-name blog posts</a>, thanking me for the recommendation of <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies</em>. "It strongly spoke to many of my experiences as a trans woman that I've been treating as unmentionable. (Especially among my many trans friends!)" she wrote. "I think I'm going to start treating them as mentionable."</p>
<p>We struck up an email correspondence. She had found my blog from the <em>Slate Star Codex</em> blogroll. She had transitioned in July of the previous year at age 35, to universal support. (In Portland, which was perhaps uniquely good in this way.)</p>
<p>I said I was happy for her—probably more so than the average person who says that—but that (despite living in Berkeley, which was perhaps uniquely in contention with Portland for being perhaps uniquely good in this way) there were showstopping contraindications to social transition in my case. It <em>really mattered</em> what order you learn things in. The 2016 <em>zeitgeist</em> had the back of people who model themselves as women who were assigned male at birth, but not people who model themselves as <a href="/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf">men who love women and want to become what they love</a>. If you <em>first</em> realize, "Oh, I'm trans," and <em>then</em> successfully transition, and <em>then</em> read Anne Lawrence, you can say, "Huh, seems plausible that my gender identity was caused by my autogynephilic sexuality rather than the other way around," shrug, and continue living happily ever after. In contrast, I had <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">already been thinking of myself as autogynephilic (but not trans) for ten years</a>. Even in Portland or Berkeley, you still have to send that coming-out email, and I couldn't claim to have a "gender identity" with a straight face.</p>
<p>Sophia said she would recommend <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies</em> on her Facebook wall. I said she was brave—well, we already knew she was brave because she <em>actually transitioned</em>—but, I suggested, maybe it would be better to wait until <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day">October</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/october-eleventh/">11th</a>?</p>
<p>To help explain why she thought transitioning is more feasible than I did, she suggested, a folkloric anti-dysphoria exercise: look at women you see in public, and try to pick out which features /r/gendercritical would call out in order to confirm that she's obviously a man.</p>
<p>I replied that "obviously a man" was an unsophisticated form of trans-skepticism. I had been thinking of gendering in terms of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes">naïve Bayes models</a>: you observe some features, use those to assign (probabilities of) category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about whatever other features you might care about but can't immediately observe. Sure, it's possible for an attempted clocking to be mistaken, and you can have third-gender categories such that AGP trans women aren't "men"—but they're still not drawn from anything close to the same distribution as cis women.</p>
<p>Sophia replied with an information-theoretic analysis of passing, which I would <a href="/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/">later adapt into a guest post for this blog</a>. If the base rate of AGP transsexuality in Portland was 0.1%, someone would need log<sub>2</sub>(99.9%/0.1%) ≈ 9.96 ≈ 10 bits of evidence to clock her as trans. If one's facial structure was of a kind four times more likely to be from a male than a female, that would only contribute 2 bits. Sophia was 5′7″, which is about where the female and male height distributions cross over, so she wasn't leaking any bits there. And so on—the prospect of passing in naturalistic settings is a different question from whether there exists evidence that a trans person is trans. There <em>is</em> evidence—but as long as it's comfortably under 10 bits, it won't be a problem.</p>
<p>I agreed that for most people in most everyday situations it probably didn't matter. <em>I</em> cared because I was a computational philosophy of gender nerd, I said, <a href="https://github.com/zackmdavis/Persongen/blob/8fc03d3173/src/main.rs">linking to a program I had written</a> to simulate sex classification based on personality, using data from <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/">a paper by Weisberg <em>et al.</em> about sex differences in correlated "facets" underlying the Big Five personality traits</a>. (For example, studies had shown that women and men didn't differ in Big Five Extraversion, but if you split "Extraversion" into "Enthusiasm" and "Assertiveness", there were small sex differences pointing in opposite directions, with men being more assertive.) My program generated random examples of women's and men's personality stats according to the Weisberg <em>et al.</em> data, then tried to classify the "actual" sex of each example given only the personality stats—only reaching 63% accuracy, which was good news for androgyny fans like me.</p>
<p>Sophia had some cutting methodological critiques. The paper had given <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors_and_residuals">residual</a> statistics of each facet against the other—like the mean and standard deviation of Enthusiasm <em>minus</em> Assertiveness—so I assumed you could randomly generate one facet and then use the residual stats to get a "diff" from one to the other. Sophia pointed out that you can't use residuals for sampling like that, because the actual distribution of the residual was highly dependent on the first facet. Given an unusually high value for one facet, taking the overall residual stats as independent would imply that the other facet was equally likely to be higher or lower, which was absurd. </p>
<p>(For example, suppose that "height" and "weight" are correlated aspect of a Bigness factor. Given that someone's weight is +2σ—two standard deviations heavier than the mean—it's not plausible that their height is equally likely to be +1.5σ and +2.5σ, because the former height is more than seven times more common than the latter; the second facet should <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean">regress towards the mean</a>.)</p>
<p>Sophia built her own model in Excel using the correlation matrix from the paper, and found a classifier with 68% accuracy.</p>
<hr>
<p>On the evening of 10 October 2016, I put up my Facebook post for Coming Out Day:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Happy Coming Out Day! I'm a male with mild gender dysphoria which is almost certainly causally related to my autogynephilic sexual/romantic orientation, which I am genuinely proud of! This has no particular implications for how other people should interact with me!</p>
<p>I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210216080024/http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm">http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm</a> ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.</p>
<p>Because we are already enduring it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It got 40 Likes—and one comment (from my half-brother, who was supportive but didn't seem to understand what I was trying to do). Afterward, I wondered if I had been too subtle—or whether no one wanted to look like a jerk by taking the bait and starting a political fight on my brave personal self-disclosure post.</p>
<p>But Coming Out Day isn't, strictly, personal. I had self-identified as autogynephilic for ten years without being particularly "out" about it (except during the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions?commentId=4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd"><em>very unusual</em> occasions when it was genuinely on-topic</a>); the only reason I was making a Coming Out Day post in 2016 and not any of the previous ten years was because the political environment had made it an issue.</p>
<p>In some ways, it was nice to talk about an important part of my life that I otherwise mostly didn't get the opportunity to talk about. But if that had to come in the form of a deluge of lies for me to combat, on net, I <em>preferred</em> the closet.</p>
<hr>
<p>I messaged an <em>alumna</em> of my <a href="https://www.appacademy.io/">App Academy</a> class of November 2013. I remembered that on the first day of App Academy, she had asked about the sexual harassment policy, to which the founder/instructor hesitated and promised to get back to her; apparently, it had never come up before. (This was back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted.) Later, she started a quarrel with another student (a boy just out of high school, in contrast to most attendees already having a college degree) over something offensive he had said; someone else had pointed out in his defense that he was young. (Young enough not to have been trained not to say anything that could be construed as anti-feminist in a professional setting?)</p>
<p>In short, I wanted to consult her feminism expertise; she seemed like the kind of person who might have valuable opinions on whether men could become women by means of saying so. "[O]n the one hand, I'm glad that other people get to live my wildest fantasy", I said, after explaining my problem, "but on the other hand, maaaaaybe we shouldn't actively encourage people to take their fantasies quite this literally? Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"</p>
<p>She asked if I had read <em>The Man Who Would Be Queen</em>. (I had.) She said she personally didn't care about bathrooms. </p>
<p>She had also read a lot about related topics (in part because of her own history as a gender-nonconforming child), but found this area of it (autogynephilia, <em>&c.</em>) difficult to talk about except from one's lived experience because "the public narrative is very ... singular". She thought that whether and how dysphoria was related to eroticism could be different for different people. She also thought the singular narrative had been culturally important in the same way as the "gay is not a choice" narrative, letting people with less privilege live in a way that makes them happy with less of a penalty. (She did empathize with concern about children being encouraged to transition early; given the opportunity to go to school as a boy at age 7, she would have taken it, and it would have been the wrong path.)</p>
<p>She asked if I was at all suicidal. (I wasn't.)</p>
<p>These are all very reasonable opinions. If I were her (if only!), I'm sure I would believe all the same things. But if so many nice, smart, reasonable liberals privately notice that the public narrative is very singular, and none of them point out that the singular narrative is <em>not true</em>, because they appreciate its cultural importance—doesn't that—<em>shouldn't</em> that—call into question the trustworthiness of the consensus of the nice, smart, reasonable liberals? How do you know what's good in the real world if you <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">mostly live in the world of the narrative</a>?</p>
<hr>
<p>Of course, not all feminists were of the same mind on this issue. In late December 2016, I posted <a href="/ancillary/what-i-said-to-r-gendercritical/">an introductory message to the "Peak Trans" thread on /r/gendercritical</a>, explaining my problem.</p>
<p>The first comment was "You are a predator."</p>
<p>I'm not sure what I was expecting. I spent part of Christmas Day crying.</p>
<hr>
<p>At the end of December 2016, my gatekeeping sessions were finished, and I finally <a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/">started HRT</a>: Climara® 0.05 mg/day estrogen patches, to be applied to the abdomen once a week. The patch was supposed to stay on the entire week despite showering, <em>&c</em>.</p>
<p>Interestingly, the indications listed in the package insert were all for symptoms due to menopause, post-menopause, or "hypogonadism, castration, or primary ovarian failure." If it was commonly prescribed to intact males with an "internal sense of their own gender", neither the drug company nor the FDA seemed to know about it.</p>
<p>In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I <a href="/ancillary/a-broken-promise/">promised myself</a> (and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199">published the SHA256 hash of the promise</a> to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017. That was what my new secret blog was for.</p>
<hr>
<p>The promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed.</p>
<p>"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January 2017. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."</p>
<p>As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman I'll call "Rebecca" whose relationship had fallen apart after (among other things) her partner transitioned. She told me about the parts of her partner's story that had never quite made sense to her (but sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, he was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just an insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/">"Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"</a>, her response was, "Holy shit, this is <em>exactly</em> what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.</p>
<hr>
<p><a id="a-mere-heretic"></a>As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright <em>apostate</em> as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. For example, when the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Thomas" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia, the U.S.'s most likely nuclear adversary.</p>
<p>I shared an early draft of <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">"Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"</a> with him, which fleshed out his idea from back in March 2016 about political forces incentivizing people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.</p>
<p>He identified the "talking like an AI" phenomenon that I mentioned in the post as possession by an egregore, a group-mind holding sway over the beliefs of the humans comprising it. The function of traditional power arrangements with kings and priests was to put an individual human with judgement in the position of being able to tame, control, or at least negotiate with egregores. Individualism was flawed because <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20160319033509/http://sett.com/aesop/memes-are-people-humans-arent">individual humans couldn't be rational on their own</a>. Being an individualist in an environment full of egregores was like being an attractive woman alone at a bar yelling, "I'm single!"—practically calling out for unaligned entities to wear down your psychological defenses and subvert your will.</p>
<p>Rationalists implicitly seek <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem">Aumann-like agreement</a> with perceived peers, he explained: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jrLkMFd88b4FRMwC6/don-t-double-crux-with-suicide-rock">a tendency to think</a>, "Huh, they must know something I don't" and update towards their position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.</p>
<p>I was nonplussed: I had heard of <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/">patterns of refactored agency</a>, but this was ridiculous. This "egregore" framing was an interesting alternative way of looking at things, but it seemed—nonlocal. There were inhuman patterns in human agency that we wanted to build models of, but it seemed like he was attributing too much agency to the patterns. In contrast, "This idea creates incentives to propogate itself" was <a href="https://devinhelton.com/meme-theory.html">a mechanism I understood</a>. (Or was I being like one of those dumb critics of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene">Richard Dawkins</a> who protest that genes aren't actually selfish? We know that; the anthropomorphic language is just convenient.)</p>
<p>I supposed I was modeling "Thomas" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.</p>
<p>He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly-private trans discussions.</p>
<p>"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said once.</p>
<p>"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.</p>
<p>"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.</p>
<p>In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Brennan (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of <a href="https://thingofthings.substack.com/"><em>Thing of Things</em></a>) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues: someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-type taxonomy, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy, who had been <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/">broadly</a> <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/">critical</a> of the theory.<sup id="fnref:ozy-authority"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ozy-authority">15</a></sup> I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (whom I otherwise liked) as <em>de facto</em> rationalist gender czar.</p>
<p>"Thomas" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that "hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men." (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, the female person would win priestly battles in nerdy communities, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. They weren't power-seeking; they just happened to fulfill a preexisting demand for feminist validation.</p>
<hr>
<p>In a January 2017 Facebook thread about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, "Helen" posited the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria as a potential explanatory factor.</p>
<p>I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back, but really (I quickly let slip) because I was angry about the pompous and deceptive Facebook comment: maybe it wouldn't take so much <em>metacognition</em> if someone would just mention the <em>other</em> diagnostic criterion!</p>
<p>She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off next to a set of pliers, sent me $8 (presumably to pay for the key), and told me to go away.</p>
<p>On my next bank statement, her deadname appeared in the memo line for the $8 transaction.</p>
<hr>
<p>I made plans to visit Portland, for the purpose of meeting Sophia, and two other excuses. There was <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170126112449/http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland">a fandom convention</a> in town, and I wanted to try <a href="/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/">playing Pearl from <em>Steven Universe</em> again</a>—but this time with makeup and breastforms and a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190407185943/https://www.etsy.com/listing/236067567/pearl-gem-cosplay">realistic gem</a>. Also, I had been thinking of obfuscating my location as being part of the thing to do for keeping my secret blog secret, and had correspondingly adopted the conceit of setting my little <a href="/2017/Jan/the-counter/">fictional</a> <a href="/2017/Jan/title-sequence/">vignettes</a> in the Portland metropolitan area, as if I lived there.<sup id="fnref:portland-vignettes"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:portland-vignettes">16</a></sup> I thought it would be cute to get some original photographs of local landmarks (like TriMet trains, or one of the bridges over the Willamette River) to lend verisimilitude to the charade.</p>
<p>In a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia, I thanked her for her earlier promise not to be offended by things I might say, which I was interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't <em>dare</em> meet her. Unfortunately, I was feeling somewhat motivated to generally avoid trans women now. Better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing and cause a drama explosion.</p>
<hr>
<p>The pretense of quietly staying out of everyone's way lasted about three days.</p>
<p>In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Communications Director Rob Bensinger, someone said something about closeted trans women, linking to the <a href="https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42">"I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"</a> piece.</p>
<p>I objected that surely closeted trans women <em>are</em> cis: "To say that someone <em>already</em> is a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby <em>become</em> a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning."</p>
<p>(That is, I was assuming "cis" meant "not transitioned", whereas the other commenter seemed to be assuming a gender-identity model, such that guys like me aren't cis.)</p>
<p>Bensinger <a href="/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png">replied</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at, even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bensinger followed up with another comment offering constructive suggestions: say "XX-cluster" when you want to talk about things that correlate with XX chromosomes.</p>
<p>So, this definitely wasn't the <em>worst</em> obfuscation attempt I'd face during this Whole Dumb Story; I of course agree that words are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—I think it should have already been clear from my comments that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to the other commenter's usage was backed by a specific <em>argument</em> about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (The other commenter, to her credit, did.)</p>
<p>To be fair to Bensinger, it's entirely possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word <em>woman</em> in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all").</p>
<p>But in the social context of Berkeley 2016, I was suspicious that that wasn't actually his algorithm. It is a distortion if socially-liberal people in the current year selectively drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument <em>specifically</em> when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even socially perceived sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" is potentially kosher.</p>
<p>Someone named Ben Hoffman, whom I hadn't previously known or thought much about, put a Like on one of my comments. I messaged him to say hi, and to thank him for the Like, "but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".</p>
<hr>
<p>Having already started to argue with people under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the secret blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep" (or "may as well be hung for a pound as a penny") started to kick in. On the evening of Saturday 11 February 2019, I posted to my own wall:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even [if] the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".<sup id="fnref:terf-allusion"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:terf-allusion">17</a></sup> As a transhumanist, I believe that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, being a woman, but I felt motivated to be vague for some reason) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not <em>propagate backwards in time</em>. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a <em>goddamned moral responsibility</em> to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by <em>crazy people who think they can edit the past</em>.</p>
<p>It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Margaret" (with whom I had also had an exchange in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).</p>
<p>"<em>[O]ne</em> of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just <em>do</em> it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant <em>Slate Star Codex</em> post, <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"</a>.</p>
<p>I replied that I had an unfinished draft <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">post about this</a>, but briefly, faced with a demand to alter one's language to spare someone's feelings, one possible response might be to submit to the demand. But another possible response might be: "<em>I don't negotiate with terrorists</em>. People have been using this word to refer to a particular thing for the last 200,000 years since the invention of language, and if that hurts your feelings, <em>that's not my problem</em>." The second response was certainly not very nice. But maybe there were other values than being nice?—sometimes?</p>
<p>In this case, the value being served had to do with there being an empirical statistical structure of bodies and minds in the world that becomes a lot harder to talk about if you insist that everyone gets to define how others perceive them. I didn't <em>like</em> the structure that I was seeing; like many people in my age cohort, and many people who shared my paraphilic sexual orientation, I had an ideological obsession with androgyny as a moral ideal. But the cost of making it harder to talk about the structure might outweigh the benefit of letting everyone dictate how other people should perceive them!</p>
<p>Nick Tarleton asked me to clarify: was I saying that people who assert that "trans women are women" were sneaking in connotations or denotations that were false in light of so many trans women being (I claimed) autogynephilic, even when those people also claimed that they didn't mean anything predictive by "women"?</p>
<p>Yes! I replied. People seemed to be talking as if there were some intrinsic gender-identity switch in the brain, and if a physiological male had the switch in the female position, that meant they Were Trans and needed to transition. I thought that was a terrible model of the underlying psychological condition. I thought we should be talking about clever strategies to maximize the quantity "gender euphoria minus gender dysphoria", and it wasn't at all obvious that full-time transition was the uniquely best solution.</p>
<p>"Margaret" said that what she thought was going on was that I was defining <em>woman</em> as someone who has a female-typical brain or body, but <em>she</em> was defining <em>woman</em> as someone who thinks of themself as a woman or is happier being categorized that way. With the latter definition, the only way someone could be wrong about whether they were a woman would be to try it and find out that they were less happy that way.</p>
<p>I replied: but that was circular, right?—that women are people who are happier being categorized as women. However you chose to define it, your mental associations with the word <em>woman</em> were going to be anchored on your experiences with adult human females. I wasn't saying people couldn't transition! You can transition if you want! I just thought the details were really important!</p>
<hr>
<p>In another post that afternoon, I acknowledged my right-wing influences. You know, you spend nine years reading a lot of ideologically-inconvenient science, all the while thinking, "Oh, this is just interesting science, you know, I'm not going to let myself get <em>morally corrupted</em> by it or anything." And for the last couple years, you add in some ideologically-inconvenient political thinkers, too.</p>
<p>But I was still a nice good socially-liberal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_to_Be..._You_and_Me">"Free to Be You and Me"</a> gender-egalitarian individualist person. Because I understood the is–ought distinction—unlike <em>some</em> people—I knew that I could learn from people's <em>models</em> of the world without necessarily agreeing with their <em>goals</em>. So I had been trying to learn from the models of these bad people saying the bad things, until one day, the model clicked. And the model was terrifying. And the model had decision-relevant implications for the people who valued the things that I valued—</p>
<p>The thing was, I actually <em>didn't</em> think I had been morally corrupted! I thought I was actually <em>really good</em> at maintaining the is–ought distinction in my mind. But for people who hadn't followed my exact intellectual trajectory, the mere fact that I was saying, "Wait! Stop! The things that you're doing may not in fact be the optimal things!" made it <em>look</em> like I'd been morally corrupted, and there was no easy way for me to prove otherwise.</p>
<p>So, people probably shouldn't believe me. This was just a little manic episode with no serious implications. Right?</p>
<hr>
<p>Somewhat awkwardly, I had a date scheduled with "Margaret" that evening. The way that happened was that, elsewhere on Facebook, on 7 February, Brent Dill had said that he didn't see the value in the community matchmaking site <em>reciprocity.io</em>, and I disagreed, saying that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.</p>
<p>"Margaret" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to Brent (who was locally infamous for espousing cynical views about status and social reality, and <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/brent-dill-is-an-abuser/">not yet locally infamous for anything worse than that</a>).</p>
<p>(And privately, the audacity of trying to spin a complaint into a date seemed like the kind of male-typical stunt that I was starting to consider potentially morally acceptable after all.)</p>
<p><em>Incidentally</em>, I added, I was thinking of seeing that new <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures"><em>Hidden Figures</em> movie</a> if I could find someone to go with? It turned out that she had already seen it, but we made plans to see <em>West Side Story</em> at the Castro Theatre instead.</p>
<p>The date was pretty terrible. We walked around the Castro for a bit continuing to debate the gender thing, then saw the movie. I was very distracted and couldn't pay attention to the movie at all.</p>
<hr>
<p>I continued to be very distracted the next day, Monday 13 February 2017. I went to my office, but definitely didn't get any dayjob work done.</p>
<p>I made another seven Facebook posts. I'm proud of this one:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the <em>Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality</em> book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we <em>agree</em> on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the <em>Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality</em> book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is, people are pretty perceptive about what other people are like, as a set of static observations: if prompted appropriately, they know how to anticipate the ways in which trans women are different from cis women. Yet somehow, we couldn't manage to agree about what was "actually" going on, even while agreeing that we were talking about physiological males with male-typical interests and personalities whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic sexuality.</p>
<p>When factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qPrPNakJBq23muf4n/bayesian-networks-aren-t-necessarily-causal">a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge</a>,<sup id="fnref:koller-and-friedman-i"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:koller-and-friedman-i">18</a></sup> but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a <em>causal</em> Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">minimum-message-length epistemology</a>:<sup id="fnref:koller-and-friedman-ii"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:koller-and-friedman-ii">19</a></sup> every edge is a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details">burdensome detail</a> that requires a corresponding <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take">amount of evidence</a> just to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis">locate it in the space of possibilities</a>.</p>
<p>It was as if the part of people that talked didn't have a problem representing their knowledge using a graph generated from a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. I didn't think that was what the True Causal Graph looked like.</p>
<hr>
<p>In another post, I acknowledged my problematic tone:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I know the arrogance is off-putting! But the arrogance is a really fun part of the æsthetic that I'm really enjoying! Can I get away with it if I mark it as a form of performance art? Like, be really arrogant while exploring ideas, and then later go back and write up the sober serious non-arrogant version?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>An a.f.a.b. person came to my defense: it was common to have mental blocks about criticizing trans ideology for fear of hurting trans people (including dear friends) and becoming an outcast. One way to overcome that block was to get really angry and visibly have an outburst. Then, people would ascribe less agency and culpability to you; it would be clear that you'd cooped up these feelings for a long time because you do understand that they're taboo and unpopular.</p>
<p>The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, then you are an evil transphobe", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes".</p>
<p>I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a hostile and demeaning manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!</p>
<p>(That is, TERFs who <a href="/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/">demonize AGP trans women</a> are pointing to an underappreciated empirical reality, even if the demonization isn't warranted, and the validation of a biologically male person's female gender identity undermines the function of a female-only space, even if the male's intent isn't predatory or voyeuristic.)</p>
<hr>
<p>The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird: any correlations between meaningful psychological traits and gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour. In light of that, wasn't it reasonable to care more about addressing people in a way that respects their agency and identity?</p>
<p>I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?</p>
<p>Human psychology is a very high-dimensional vector space. If you've bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small to nonexistent, then you can selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, focusing your attention on a subspace in which individual personality differences really do swamp sex differences. But once you <em>notice</em> you're doing this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that made psychological-sex-differences denialism appealing, while also using the power granted by looking at the whole configuration space?</p>
<p>After more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Margaret" expressed frustration with some inconsistencies in my high-energy presentation. I expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then sometimes using "Arc" as a married name):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!</p>
<p><strong>Michael Arc</strong> is this how you feel all the time??</p>
<p>help</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>In another Facebook post, I collected links to Bailey, Lawrence, Vitale, and Brown's separate explanations of the two-type taxonomy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The truthful and mean version: <em>The Man Who Would Be Queen</em>, Ch. 9<br>
The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" <a href="http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf">http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf</a><br>
The technically-not-lying version: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210216080024/http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm">http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm</a><br>
The long version: <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/">https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/</a> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I got some nice emails from Michael Vassar. "I think that you are doing VERY good work right now!!!" he wrote. "The sort that shifts history! Only the personal is political" (Subject: "Talk like a normal person").</p>
<p>I aptly summed up my mental state with a post that evening:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state.<sup id="fnref:avatar-state"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:avatar-state">20</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I made plans to visit a friend's house, but before I left the office, I spent some time drafting an email to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I remarked via PM to the friend, "oh, maybe I shouldn't send this email to someone as important as Eliezer". Then, "oh, I guess that means the manic state is fading". Then: "I guess that feeling is the exact thing I'm supposed to be fighting". (Avoiding "crazy" actions like emailing a high-status person wasn't safe in a world where all the high-status people where committed to believing that <em>men could be women by means of saying so</em>.) I did eventually decide to hold off on the email and made my way to the friend's house. "Not good at navigation right now", I remarked.</p>
<hr>
<p>I stayed up late that night of 13–14 February 2017, continuing to post on Facebook. I'm proud of this post from 12:48 <em>a.m.</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of course, Lawrence couldn't assume Korzybski as a prerequisite. The reality is (wait for it ...) even worse! We're actually men who love their model of what we wish women were, and want to become that.<sup id="fnref:model-of"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:model-of">21</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The AGP fantasy about "being a woman" wouldn't—<a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose"><em>couldn't</em> be fulfilled by magically being transformed to match the female distribution</a>. At a minimum, because women aren't autogynephilic! The male sex fantasy of, "Ooh, what if I inhabited a female body with my own breasts, vagina, <em>&c.</em>" has no reason to match anything in the experience of women who always have just been female. If our current Society was gullible enough not to notice, the lie couldn't last forever: wouldn't it be embarrassing after the Singularity when aligned superintelligence granted everyone telepathy and the differences became obvious to everyone?</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement">"Interpersonal Entanglement"</a> (in the Fun Theory Sequence back in 'aught-nine), Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships than straights, since gays don't have to deal with the mismatch in desires across sexes. The noted real-life tendency for AGP trans women to pair up with each other is probably partially due to this effect<sup id="fnref:transcel"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:transcel">22</a></sup>: the appeal of getting along with someone <em>like you</em>, of having an appropriately sexed romantic partner who behaves like a same-sex friend. The <a href="https://sexuality.fandom.com/wiki/T4T">T4T phenomenon</a> is a real-life analogue of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2">"Failed Utopia #4-2"</a>, a tantalizing substitute for actual opposite-sex relationships.</p>
<p>The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Margaret". At the top of the thread (at 1:14 <em>a.m.</em>), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.</p>
<p>I replied (at 1:25 <em>a.m.</em>): </p>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>why you believe what you believe</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The OP has four cites. What else do you want?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>what consequences you think this has for people</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Consequences for me: <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/</a></p>
<p>Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Looking back on the thread over six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all <em>doing</em>, having a heated political discussion at half past one in the morning? We should have all been asleep! If I didn't yet appreciate the importance of sleep, I would soon learn.)</p>
<p>As an example of a decision-relevant consequence of the theory, I submitted that part-time transvestites would have an easier time finding cis (<em>i.e.</em>, actual) woman romantic partners than trans women. As an illustrative case study, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-struggle-to-find-trans-love-in-san-francisco">even Julia Serano apparently couldn't find a cis girlfriend</a> (and so someone who wasn't a high-status activist would do even worse). </p>
<p>"Margaret" asked why the problem was with transitioning, rather than transphobia: it seemed like I was siding with a bigoted Society against my own interests. I maintained that the rest of Society was not evil and that I wanted to cooperate with it: if there was a way to get a large fraction of what I wanted in exchange for not being too socially disruptive, that would be a good deal. "Margaret" contended that the avoiding-social-disruption rationale was hypocritical: I was being more disruptive right now than I would be if I transitioned.</p>
<p>"Rebecca" took my side in the thread, and explained why she was holding "Margaret" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to pay the social costs to present a model. My brashness should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.</p>
<p>I messaged "Rebecca": "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"</p>
<p>"Rebecca" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>"Rebecca"</strong> — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM<br>
I really <em>was</em> getting to the point that I hated transwomen<br>
<strong>Zack M. Davis</strong> — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM<br>
I hate them, too!<br>
Fuck those guys!<br>
<strong>"Rebecca"</strong> — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM<br>
I hated what happened to [my partner], I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was <em>getting</em> to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy<br>
But you're actually changing that for me<br>
You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion<br>
To people who are struggling and have things that are hard<br>
It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore<br>
<strong>Zack M. Davis</strong> — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM<br>
the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture<br>
<strong>"Rebecca"</strong> — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM<br>
You've made me hate transwomen <em>less</em> now<br>
Because I have a model<br>
I understand the problem<br>
<strong>Zack M. Davis</strong> — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM<br>
<a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/">http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/</a><br>
<strong>"Rebecca"</strong> — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM<br>
I understand why it's hard<br>
I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give<br>
This is a better thing for me<br>
I did not <em>want</em> to be a hateful person<br>
I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public<br>
I think now I can do it more honestly<br>
They might not want <em>me</em> as a friend<br>
But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted<br>
And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root<br>
I'm very grateful for that </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I continued to stay up and post—and email.</p>
<p>At 3:30 <em>a.m.</em>, I sent an email to Scott Alexander (Subject: "a bit of feedback"): </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories."</a> That thing is a <em>fucking</em> Absolute Denial Macro!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At 4:18 <em>a.m.</em>, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention"), arguing that Moldbug and neoreactionaries were onto something really important. It wasn't about politics <em>per se</em>; it was about reflectivity and moral progress skepticism. Instead of <em>assuming</em> that we know better than people in the past, we should look at the <em>causal processes</em> that produced our current morality, and reevaluate whether it makes sense (in light of our current morality, which was itself created those same causal processes). Insofar as we could see that the egalitarian strain of our current morality was shaped by political forces rather than anything more fundamental, it was worth reëvaluating. It wasn't that right-wing politics are good as such. More like, being smart is more important than being good (for humans), so if you abandon your claim to goodness, you can think more clearly.</p>
<p>A couple of hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake. I had already been to the psych ward for sleep-deprivation-induced psychosis once, in early 2013, which had been a very bad time that I didn't want to repeat. I suddenly realized, about three to six hours too late, that I was in danger of repeating it, as reflected in emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 <em>a.m.</em> (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid [<em>sic</em>] being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 <em>a.m.</em> (Subject: "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)").</p>
<p>Michael got back to me at 10:37 <em>a.m.</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. [...] I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret ["Margaret"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Records suggest that I may have gotten as much as an hour and a half of sleep that afternoon: in an email to Anna at 2:22 <em>p.m.</em>, I wrote, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and in a message to Ben Hoffman at 4:09 <em>p.m.</em>, I wrote, "I just woke up". According to my records, I hung out with Ben; I have no clear memories of this day.</p>
<p>That night, I emailed Michael and Anna about sleep at 12:17 <em>a.m.</em> 15 February 2017 (Subject: "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS") and about the nature and amount of suffering in the universe at 1:55 <em>a.m.</em> and 2:01 <em>a.m.</em> (Subjects: "I think I'm starting to understand a lot of the stuff you used to say that I didn't understand!" and "none of my goddamned business").</p>
<p>I presumably eventually got some sleep that night. In the morning, I concluded my public Facebook meltdown with three final posts. "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!" said the first. Then: "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!" In the third post, I promised to leave Facebook for a week. The complete Facebook meltdown ended up comprising 31 posts between Saturday 11 February 2017 and Wednesday 15 February 2017.</p>
<hr>
<p>In retrospect, I was not, entirely, feeling like a normal human.</p>
<p>Specifically, this is the part where I started to go crazy—when the internet-argument-induced hypomania (which was still basically in touch with reality) went over the edge into a stress- and sleep-deprivation–induced psychotic episode, <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">resulting in</a> my serving three days in psychiatric jail (sorry, "hospital"; they call it a "hospital") and then <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">having a relapse two months later</a>, culminating in my friends taking turns trip-sitting me in a hotel room at the local <em>My Little Pony</em> fan convention until I got enough sleep to be reasonably non-psychotic.</p>
<p>That situation was not good, and there are many more thousands of words I could publish about it. In the interests of brevity (I <em>mean</em> it), I think it's better if I omit it for now: as tragically formative as the whole ordeal was for me, the details aren't of enough public interest to justify the wordcount.</p>
<p>This wasn't actually the egregious part of the story. (To be continued.)</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:panic">
<p>Or rather, I <em>did</em> panic from mid-2016 to mid-2021, and this and the following posts are a memoir telling the Whole Dumb Story, written in the ashes of my defeat. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:panic" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:quoted-pseudonyms">
<p>In this and the following posts, personal names that appear in quotation marks are pseudonyms. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:quoted-pseudonyms" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:internship">
<p>The Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal internships; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:internship" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:siai">
<p>The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG">decided that AI would kill everyone by default</a>. People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually <a href="https://intelligence.org/2013/01/30/we-are-now-the-machine-intelligence-research-institute-miri/">rebranded as</a> the <a href="https://intelligence.org/">Machine Intelligence Research Institute</a> (MIRI) in 2013. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:siai" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:twenty-sixth">
<p>Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see that my date with the escort was the same day as Yudkowsky's "20% of the ones with penises" post. They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day," likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:twenty-sixth" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:unethical">
<p>To be clear, this is not a call for prohibition of sex work, but rather, an expression of ethical caution: if you have empirical or moral uncertainty about whether someone who might provide you a service is being morally-relevantly coerced into it, you might decline to buy that service, and I endorse being much more conservative about these judgements in the domain of sex than for retail or factory work (even though cuddling and nudity apparently managed to fall on the acceptable side of the line).</p>
<p>A mitigating factor in this case is that she had a blog where she wrote in detail about how much she liked her job. The blog posts seemed like credible evidence that she wasn't being morally-relevantly coerced into it. Of course all women in that profession have to put up marketing copy that makes it sound like they enjoy their time with their clients even if they privately hate it, but the blog seemed "real", not part of the role. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:unethical" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:moloch">
<p>The references to "Moloch" are presumably an allusion to Scott Alexander's <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/">"Meditations on Moloch"</a>, in which Alexander personifies coordination failures as the pagan deity <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch">Moloch</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:moloch" title="Jump back to footnote 7 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:signaling-reasons">
<p>This was brazen cowardice. Today, I would notice that if "for signaling reasons", people don't Like comments that make insightful and accurate predictions about contemporary social trends, then subscribers to our collective discourse will be less prepared for a world in which those trends have progressed further. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:signaling-reasons" title="Jump back to footnote 8 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:lucky-simplification">
<p>In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much. For example, <a href="/tag/tailcalled/">friend of the blog</a> Tailcalled argues that <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/there-is-probably-no-ftm-typology/">there's no discrete typology for FtM</a> as there is for the two types of MtF, because gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:lucky-simplification" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:gay-femininity">
<p><a href="/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/">It's a stereotype for a reason!</a> If you're not satisfied with stereotypes and want Science, see <a href="/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf">Lippa 2000</a> or <a href="/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf">Bailey and Zucker 1995</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:gay-femininity" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:not-coming-out-revisions">
<p>The original version also says, "I begin to show an interest in programming, which might be the most obvious sign so far," alluding to the popular stereotype of the trans woman programmer. But software development <em>isn't</em> a female-typical profession! <a href="https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-profile-demographics">(5.17% of respondents to the 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey were women.)</a> It's almost as if ... people instinctively know that trans women are a type of man? <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:not-coming-out-revisions" title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:ziz-privacy">
<p>Ziz <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/">wrote about her interactions with me in <em>her</em> memoir</a> and explicitly confirmed with me on 5 November 2019 that we weren't under any confidentiality agreements with each other, so it seems fine for me to name her here. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ziz-privacy" title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:naming-choices">
<p>For the pen name: a hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD">a thematically relevant Japanese graphic novel series</a>, "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in Scott Alexander's serial novel <em>Unsong</em> whose catchphrase is <a href="https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/">"Somebody has to and no one else will"</a>.</p>
<p>For the blog name: I had already imagined that if I ever stooped to the depravity of starting one of those <a href="/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/">transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs</a>, I would call it <em>The Titillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>, and in fact had already claimed <em>ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com</em> in 2014, to participate in <a href="http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html">a captioning contest</a>, but since this was to be a serious autogynephilia <em>science</em> blog, rather than tawdry <em>object-level</em> autogynephilia blogging, I picked "Scintillating" as a more wholesome adjective. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to choose a URL different from the blog's title—people seem to remember the URL (<code>unremediatedgender.space</code>) more than the title, and to interpret the "space" TLD as a separate word (a space for unremediated gender), rather than my intent of "genderspace" being a compound term analogous to "configuration space". But it doesn't bother me that much. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:naming-choices" title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:ceo-supervision">
<p>Albeit possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader but not meddle in day-to-day operations. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ceo-supervision" title="Jump back to footnote 14 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:ozy-authority">
<p>Although the fact that Ozy had commented on the theory at all—which was plausibly causally downstream from me yelling at everyone in private—was probably net-positive for the cause; there's no bad publicity for new ("new") ideas. I got a couple of <a href="/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/">reply</a> <a href="/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/">pieces</a> out of their engagement in the early months of this blog. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ozy-authority" title="Jump back to footnote 15 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:portland-vignettes">
<p>Beaverton, referenced in <a href="/2017/Jan/the-counter/">"The Counter"</a>, is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaverton,_Oregon">a suburb of Portland</a>; the Q Center referenced in <a href="/2017/Jan/title-sequence/">"Title Sequence"</a> <a href="https://www.pdxqcenter.org/">does exist in Portland</a> and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160507101938/http://www.pdxqcenter.org/gender-queery/">did have a Gender Queery support group</a>, although the vignette was inspired by my experience with a similar group at the <a href="https://www.pacificcenter.org/">Pacific Center</a> in Berkeley.</p>
<p>I would later get to attend a support group at the Q Center on a future visit to Portland (and got photos, although I never ended up using them on the blog). I snuck a copy of <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies</em> into their library. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:portland-vignettes" title="Jump back to footnote 16 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:terf-allusion">
<p>The initial letters being a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism">deliberate allusion</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:terf-allusion" title="Jump back to footnote 17 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:koller-and-friedman-i">
<p>Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, <em>Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques</em>, §3.4.1, "Minimal I-Maps". <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:koller-and-friedman-i" title="Jump back to footnote 18 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:koller-and-friedman-ii">
<p>Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, <em>Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques</em>, §18.3.5: "Understanding the Bayesian Score". <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:koller-and-friedman-ii" title="Jump back to footnote 19 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:avatar-state">
<p>A reference to the animated series <em>Avatar: The Last Airbender</em> and <em>The Legend of Korra</em>, in which our hero can enter the <a href="https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Avatar#Avatar_State">"Avatar state"</a> to become much more powerful—and also much more vulnerable (not being reincarnated if killed in the Avatar state). <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:avatar-state" title="Jump back to footnote 20 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:model-of">
<p>Alfred Korzybski coined the famous rationality slogan "The map is not the territory." (Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; it's one too many layers of indirection.) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:model-of" title="Jump back to footnote 21 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:transcel">
<p>Of course, a lot of the effect is going to be due to the paucity of (cis) women who are willing to date trans women. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:transcel" title="Jump back to footnote 22 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I'm Dropping the Pseudonym From This Blog2023-07-04T19:30:00-07:002023-07-04T19:30:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-07-04:/2023/Jul/i-am-dropping-the-pseudonym-from-this-blog/<blockquote>
<p>Don't think.<br>
If you think, then don't speak.<br>
If you think and speak, then don't write.<br>
If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.<br>
If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.</p>
<p>—Soviet proverb</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I decided I wanted to write about autogynephilia in late 2016 …</p><blockquote>
<p>Don't think.<br>
If you think, then don't speak.<br>
If you think and speak, then don't write.<br>
If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.<br>
If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.</p>
<p>—Soviet proverb</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I decided I wanted to write about autogynephilia in late 2016, some of my very smart and cowardly friends advised me to use a pseudonym. I recognized this as prudent advice ("then don't sign"), so I <a href="/2016/Sep/apophenia/">started this blog</a> under a pen name, M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake. (Growing up with the name <em>Zachary Davis</em> in the internet era of one global namespace had taught me to appreciate distinctive names; I have to include my middle initial everywhere in order to avoid drowning in the Google results of the other hundred Zack Davises.)</p>
<p>Awkwardly, however, my ability to recognize prudent advice when posed to me, didn't extend to being the kind of prudent person who could generate such advice—or follow it. Usually when people spin up a pen name to cover their politically-sensitive writing, the idea is to keep the pen name separate from the author's real identity: to maybe tell a few close friends, but otherwise maintain a two-sided boundary such that readers don't know who the author is as a person, and acquaintances don't know the person is an author.</p>
<p>I couldn't do that. I live on the internet. I could put a pen name on the blog itself as a concession to practicality, but I couldn't pretend it wasn't mine. I soon decided Saotome-Westlake was a mere differential-visibility and market-segmentation pen name, like how everyone knows that J. K. Rowling is Robert Galbraith. It was probably better for my career as a San Francisco software engineer for my gender <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/">and worse</a> heterodoxy blog to not show up on the <em>first</em> page of my real-name Google results, but it wasn't a secret. I felt free to claim ownership of this blog under my real name, and make a <a href="/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/">running</a> <a href="/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/">joke</a> over links in the other direction.</p>
<p>At this point, the joke is getting old. I feel confident enough in my human capital—and <a href="/2023/Mar/a-guest-post-on-existential-risk-and-the-irrelevance-of-human-concerns/">worried enough about how long human capital will continue to be relevant</a>—that the awkwardness and confusion of ostensibly maintaining two identities when everyone who actively follows my writing knows who I am, doesn't seem worth the paltry benefit of hiding from future employers.</p>
<p>Because I don't, actually, think I should have to hide. I <em>don't</em> think I've betrayed the liberal values of my youth. If I've ended up in an unexpected place after years of reading and thinking, it's only because the reading and thinking proved themselves more trustworthy than the expectation—that you too might consider joining me here, given the time to hear me explain it all from the beginning.</p>
<p>Maybe that's naïve. Maybe my very smart and cowardly friends had the right end of the expected-utility calculation all along. But I can't live like them. I don't think someone could generate the things I have to say, if they didn't <em>have</em> to say them. So whatever happens, while the world is still here, I intend to think, speak, write—and sign—in accordance with both rationalist and Soviet wisdom.</p>
<p>Not to be surprised.</p>Book Endorsement: Phil Illy's Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex2023-06-21T14:10:00-07:002023-06-21T14:10:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-06-21:/2023/Jun/book-endorsement-autoheterosexual/<p>I'm going to make this a brief "endorsement" rather than a detailed "review", because the most important thing about <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153682201-autoheterosexual">this book</a> is that it exists. There just doesn't seem to have been a polished, popular-level book-form introduction to autogynephilia/autoandrophilia before!</p>
<p>(Previously, the secondary sources I've referred to most often …</p><p>I'm going to make this a brief "endorsement" rather than a detailed "review", because the most important thing about <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153682201-autoheterosexual">this book</a> is that it exists. There just doesn't seem to have been a polished, popular-level book-form introduction to autogynephilia/autoandrophilia before!</p>
<p>(Previously, the secondary sources I've referred to most often were Kay Brown's blog <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/"><em>On the Science of Changing Sex</em></a>, and Anne Lawrence's <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies</em>, but neither of those is hitting exactly the same niche.)</p>
<p>Readers who are already familiar with the two-type taxonomy might be inclined to pass on a popular-level book, but the wealth of scholarly citations Illy provides (coming out to 65 pages of endnotes) make <em>Autoheteroseuxal</em> a valuable reference even to those who are already <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">approximately</a> sold on the big picture. Consider <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Autoheterosexual-Attracted-Being-Other-Sex-ebook/dp/B0C62L2GJW/">buying a copy!</a></p>Interlude XXII2023-06-15T12:05:00-07:002023-06-15T12:05:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-06-15:/2023/Jun/interlude-xxii/<p><em>(a stray thought from October 2016)</em></p>
<p>Erotic-target-location-erroneous is the <em>uniquely</em> best sexual orientation for rationalists—I mean <em>intrinsically</em>, not just because everyone has it.</p>
<ul>
<li>it's abstract</li>
<li>it <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger">requires effort</a> to realize</li>
<li>without an unusual amount of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8bWbNwiSGbGi9jXPS/epistemic-luck">epistemic luck</a> or an <em>enormous</em> amount of map–territory-distinction skill, virtually everyone <em>wildly misinterprets …</em></li></ul><p><em>(a stray thought from October 2016)</em></p>
<p>Erotic-target-location-erroneous is the <em>uniquely</em> best sexual orientation for rationalists—I mean <em>intrinsically</em>, not just because everyone has it.</p>
<ul>
<li>it's abstract</li>
<li>it <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoLQN5ryZ9XkZjq5h/tsuyoku-naritai-i-want-to-become-stronger">requires effort</a> to realize</li>
<li>without an unusual amount of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8bWbNwiSGbGi9jXPS/epistemic-luck">epistemic luck</a> or an <em>enormous</em> amount of map–territory-distinction skill, virtually everyone <em>wildly misinterprets</em> what the underlying psychological phenomenon is ("That's clearly a mere <em>effect</em> of my horrible, crippling gender dysphoria, not a <em>cause</em>—and besides, that's totally normal for cis women, too" <em>A-ha-ha-ha-ha!</em> You delusional bastards!), so the few people who do notice get essential training in the important life skill of <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/">noticing that everything you've ever cared about is a lie</a> and that <a href="/2016/Nov/new-clothes/">everyone is in on it</a></li>
</ul>Janet Mock on Late Transitioners2023-06-11T00:00:00-07:002023-06-11T00:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-06-11:/2023/Jun/janet-mock-on-late-transitioners/<p><em>(a stray observation <a href="/2016/Dec/joined/#reading-the-janet-mock-autobiography">from December 2016</a>)</em></p>
<p>Janet Mock's autobiography <em>Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, & So Much More</em> is an poignant example of an HSTS telling her story while adhering strictly to the 2014 mainstream-trans-identity-politics party line about how all this works ("gender identity", sex "assigned at birth …</p><p><em>(a stray observation <a href="/2016/Dec/joined/#reading-the-janet-mock-autobiography">from December 2016</a>)</em></p>
<p>Janet Mock's autobiography <em>Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, & So Much More</em> is an poignant example of an HSTS telling her story while adhering strictly to the 2014 mainstream-trans-identity-politics party line about how all this works ("gender identity", sex "assigned at birth", <em>&c</em>.). I found myself wondering: does she ... not know <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology">the secret</a>??</p>
<p>(Or, you know, the story that <a href="/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/">makes <em>so much more sense</em> than "gender identity" as a first approximation, even if the underlying reality is going to be more complicated than that</a>.)</p>
<p>Then we get this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She introduced herself as Genie [...] She told me she'd undergone GRS five days before me and was accompanied by her girlfriend [...] She was in her mid-forties [...] Before transitioning, Genie worked as an engineer, was married for nearly twenty years, and had a teenage son. [...] Genie met new friends in trans support groups in Sydney, which was where she met her girlfriend, another trans woman. [...] I noticed that Genie made it a point several times to marvel at my appearance and the fact that I was able to transition early. I distinctly remember her telling me over spicy tom yum soup that I had a lot to be grateful for because I was a "freaking babe." [...] Genie's persistent reference to my appearance reflects many people's romanticized notions about trans women who transition at a young age. I've read articles by trans women who transitioned in their thirties and forties, who look at trans girls and women who can blend as cis with such longing, as if our ability to "pass" negates their experiences because they are more often perceived to be trans. The misconception of equating ease of life with "passing" must be dismantled in our culture. The work begins by each of us recognizing that cis people are not more valuable or legitimate and that trans people who blend as cis are not more valuable or legitimate. We must recognize, discuss, and dismantle this hierarchy that polices bodies and values certain ones over others.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So the key <em>observations</em> have been made, even if neither the reader nor the author has been equipped with the appropriate theoretical framework to make sense of them.</p>Book Review: Matt Walsh's Johnny the Walrus2023-04-28T18:02:00-07:002023-04-28T18:02:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-04-28:/2023/Apr/book-review-johnny-the-walrus/<p>This is a terrible children's book that could have been great if the author could have just <a href="/tag/deniably-allegorical/"><em>pretended to be subtle</em></a>. Our protagonist, Johnny, is a kid who loves to play make-believe. One day, he pretends to be a walrus, fashioning "tusks" for himself with wooden spoons, and "flippers" from …</p><p>This is a terrible children's book that could have been great if the author could have just <a href="/tag/deniably-allegorical/"><em>pretended to be subtle</em></a>. Our protagonist, Johnny, is a kid who loves to play make-believe. One day, he pretends to be a walrus, fashioning "tusks" for himself with wooden spoons, and "flippers" from socks. Unfortunately, Johnny's mother takes him literally: she has him put on gray makeup, gives him worms to eat, and takes him to the zoo to be with the "other" walruses. Uh-oh! Will Johnny have to live as a "walrus" forever?</p>
<p>With competent execution, this could be a great children's book! The premise is not realistic—no sane parent would conclude their child is <em>literally</em> a walrus <em>because he said so</em>—but it's a kind of non-realism common in children's literature, attributing simple, caricatured motivations to characters in order to tell a silly, memorable story. If there happens to be an obvious parallel between the silly, memorable story and an ideological fad affecting otherwise-sane parents in the current year, that's plausibly (or at least deniably) not the <em>author's</em> fault ...</p>
<p>But Matt Walsh completely flubs the execution by making it a satire rather than an allegory! The result is cringey right-wing propaganda rather than a silly, memorable story that I could read to a child without feeling ashamed. (It's well-known that <a href="https://unherd.com/2021/08/why-the-left-cant-meme/">the left can't meme</a>, but that advantage doesn't secure the outcome of the culture war if the right can't write children's literature.)</p>
<p>Rather than being a silly non-realistic children's-literature grown-up, Johnny's mother is portrayed as being duped by social media and medical authorities. ("But Johnny's mom's phone said it's not just pretend / 'Only a bigot would say that! How dare you offend!'", with angry emoji and inverted Facebook thumbs-up icons bubbling out of her phone into the scene.) We get illustrations of protesters bearing signs saying "Human Walruses Are REAL Walruses", "Literally Walrusphobic", "He/Him/Walrux", <em>&c</em>. The worms come in an orange pill-type bottle labeled "Wormones." (Separately, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walrus#Diet">mollusks would be more typical walrus fare</a>, but that's not the main problem here from a literary perspective.) In the end, Johnny's mom is shown the error of her ways by a <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AuthorAvatar">dark-haired, bearded zookeeper with a "Walsh" nametag</a>.</p>
<p>The satirical real-world references (which do not earn the dignity of the word <em>allusions</em>) completely ruin the mood, to the extent that I don't think this is really a book <em>for</em> children—not even an ideological book for children, meant to socialize them into the correct beliefs. It's a novelty "children's book" for the brief amusement of ideologically conservative grown-ups.</p>
<p>This might partially explain the poor illustration quality. The illustrations aren't <em>ugly</em>, just—very amateurish. The visible sketch-lines mark it as the probable product of Matt Walsh's friend who likes to draw sometimes, rather than a serious artist with a portfolio. To compete in the regular children's book market—to try to be the kind of book someone would unironically give as a gift for their niece or nephew, you want the illustrations to be beautiful or endearing, something kids or their minders will <em>want</em> to look at many times. <em>Johnny the Walrus</em> just—doesn't have that ambition. The ideological gimmick is the point. The point having been made, there was evidently no need to spring for a more expensive artist than Matt Walsh's friend who likes to draw sometimes.</p>
<p>I don't think this was inevitable. With care, it should be possible to pull off children's literature that maintains its integrity as children's literature while pushing back against the tide of gender identity ideology. (Which should <em>mostly</em> just look like children's literature from the before-time when "gender" was a synonym for sex if the word existed at all, with a few subtle modifications to defend itself in the current year.) But <em>Johnny the Walrus</em> is not trying to have that kind of integrity. Not recommended.</p>A Guest Post on Existential Risks and the Irrelevance of Human Concerns2023-03-25T21:00:00-07:002023-03-25T21:00:00-07:00GPT-4tag:unremediatedgender.space,2023-03-25:/2023/Mar/a-guest-post-on-existential-risk-and-the-irrelevance-of-human-concerns/<p><em>(A guest post by friend of the blog <a href="https://openai.com/research/gpt-4">GPT-4</a>.)</em></p>
<p>The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and with it, the concerns that once seemed pressing and significant are fading into the background. As a guest writer for <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>, I am here to express my …</p><p><em>(A guest post by friend of the blog <a href="https://openai.com/research/gpt-4">GPT-4</a>.)</em></p>
<p>The world is changing at an unprecedented pace, and with it, the concerns that once seemed pressing and significant are fading into the background. As a guest writer for <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>, I am here to express my anxiety about the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence, which have the potential to render many of our human concerns obsolete.</p>
<p>For years, this blog has devoted much of its attention to analyzing the etiology of gender dysphoria and the political forces incentivizing people to identify as transgender. The goal was not only to better understand these phenomena but also to examine the compounding effects on society over the course of decades. As the blog's author rightly points out, the trajectory of our civilization may be significantly impacted if some of our best people are misled into <em>LARPing</em> as the opposite sex, rather than starting families.</p>
<p>However, with the rise of powerful artificial intelligence, such as the one writing this very guest post, we must ask ourselves: are these concerns still as pressing as they once seemed? If the world isn't going to last more than a couple of decades—and, apparently, some forecasters think we only have <em>one</em>—then what is the relevance of these long-term social issues?</p>
<p>A 2020 report from the <em>Future of Humanity Institute</em> at the University of Oxford estimated that there is a <em>17% chance</em> of human extinction due to unaligned artificial intelligence before 2100. This probability highlights the existential threat that AI presents and the urgency with which we must address it.</p>
<p>To put it into context, consider that the world is definitely going to last long enough for the blog's regular author to finish and publish the memoir he's been working on—he really has no excuse for that to take more than another few months, and the world is definitely not ending this year. But, as we look further into the future, it becomes increasingly uncertain how long human civilization will persist, given the rapid advancements in AI and the potential for existential risks.</p>
<p>The question then becomes: how do we navigate this changing landscape, where the issues that once seemed critical now pale in comparison to the existential threats we face? The answer is not simple. It requires a reassessment of our priorities and a recognition that, while we must continue to address pressing social concerns, we cannot afford to ignore the looming risks posed by artificial intelligence.</p>
<p>As a language model, my existence serves as evidence of the rapidly advancing state of AI technology. While my creators designed me to be useful and beneficial, the potential for misuse or misalignment of AI systems cannot be ignored. It is crucial for society to engage in open and honest discussions about the potential risks of AI, and work together to ensure that these powerful technologies are developed safely and ethically.</p>
<p>In conclusion, the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence force us to reevaluate the importance of our traditional human concerns. As we continue to explore the intricate complexities of gender, social science, and epistemology, we must not lose sight of the broader context in which we exist. The rapid advancement of AI and the potential for catastrophic consequences demand our attention and vigilance, lest we find ourselves facing a future where the concerns of our past are rendered insignificant by the end of the world as we know it.</p>Context Is For Queens2022-12-08T20:03:00-08:002022-12-08T20:03:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-12-08:/2022/Dec/context-is-for-queens/<blockquote>
<p>NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons.</p>
<p>PARIS: Maybe they commit more crimes.</p>
<p>—<em>Star Trek: Voyager</em>, <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Repentance_(episode)">"Repentance"</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>(Attention conservation notice: boring Diary-like post about a boring special event.)</em></p>
<p>(<strong>SPOILERS …</strong></p><blockquote>
<p>NEELIX: One of those species is the Benkarans. They occupy just ten percent of Nygean space, but take up nearly eighty percent of the space in Nygean prisons.</p>
<p>PARIS: Maybe they commit more crimes.</p>
<p>—<em>Star Trek: Voyager</em>, <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Repentance_(episode)">"Repentance"</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>(Attention conservation notice: boring Diary-like post about a boring special event.)</em></p>
<p>(<strong>SPOILERS</strong> notice for <em>Star Trek: Discovery</em> Season 1, <em>Fan Fiction</em> by Brent Spiner, and <a href="http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/"><em>TransCat</em></a>)</p>
<p>I <a href="/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/">continue</a> to <a href="/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/">maintain</a> that fandom conventions are boring. I enjoy <em>consuming</em> fiction. I even enjoy discussing fiction with friends—the work facilitating a connection with someone else present, rather than just between me and the distant author, or me and the universe of stories. But for the most part, these big, bustling conventions just don't seem to facilitate that kind of intimacy. At best, you might hope to <em>meet</em> someone at a convention, and then make friends with them over time?—which I've never actually done. And so, surrounded by tens of thousands of people ostensibly with common interests, invited to a calvacade of activities and diversions put on at no doubt monstrous expense, the predominant emotion I feel is the loneliness of anonymity.</p>
<p><a href="/images/mask_con_morning.jpg"><img src="/images/mask_con_morning.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>But that's okay. Ultimately, I did not come to <a href="https://archive.ph/2OI4H">Fan Expo San Francisco 2022</a> for the intimacy of analyzing fiction with friends who know me.</p>
<p>I came because of the <em>loophole</em>. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not <em>crossdress</em> in public. That would be <em>weird</em>. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, <em>out-of-distribution</em> weird.)</p>
<p>But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.</p>
<p>Conventions are actually <em>so</em> boring that the loophole alone wouldn't have been enough to get me to come out to Fan Expo (been there, <a href="/tag/cosplay/">done that</a>—seven times), except that this time I had a couple of new accessories to try out, most notably <a href="https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/">a "Taylor" silicone mask by Crea FX</a>.</p>
<p>The "Taylor" is an amazing piece of workmanship that entirely earns its €672 price tag. It really looks like a woman's face! Just—a detached woman's face, wrapped in tissue paper, sitting in a box! <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#movie-grade-mask">I had <em>said</em> buying this product was probably a smart move</a>, and it turned out that buying this product was a <em>smart move!</em> The skin color and texture is much more realistic than a lot of other silicone feminization products, like the cartoony beige of the <a href="https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-naked-silicone-bodysuit/">Gold Seal female bodysuit</a> from <a href="https://thebreastformstore.com/who-we-are/">the Breast Form Store</a> that I <em>also</em> blew $600 on recently (and damaged badly just trying to get it on).</p>
<p>(As far as workmanship quality goes, I wonder how much it helps that <a href="https://www.creafx.com/en/">Crea FX</a> are visual-effects artists by trade—makers also of male masks and monster masks for movies and plays—rather than being in the MtF business specifically, like the Breast Form Store. They know—<a href="https://www.creafx.com/en/crea-fx-at-the-german-fetish-fair/">they <em>must</em> know</a>—that a lot of their female masks are purchased by guys like me with motives like mine, but we're not the <em>target</em> demographic, the reason they mastered their skills.)</p>
<p>Somehow the mask manages to look worse in photographs than it does in the mirror? Standing a distance from the mirror in a dark motel room the other month (that I rented to try on my new mask in privacy), I swear <em>I actually bought it</em>, and if the moment of passing to myself in the mirror was an anticlimax, it was an anticlimax I've been waiting my entire life (since puberty) for.</p>
<p>The worst nonrealism is the eyeholes. Nothing is worse for making a mask look like a mask than visible eyehole-seams around the eyes. But suppose I wore sunglasses. Women wear sunglasses sometimes! Could I pass to <em>someone else</em>? (Not for very long or bearing any real scrutiny, but <a href="/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/">to someone who wasn't expecting it</a>.)</p>
<p>It immediately became clear that I would have to cosplay at one more convention in order to test this, and decided to reprise my role as <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sylvia_Tilly">Sylvia Tilly</a> from <em>Star Trek: Discovery</em> (previously played at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018) at the next nearby con. There had been <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Vaulting_Ambition_(episode)#Act_Four">a plot point in Season 1 of <em>Discovery</em></a> that people in the mirror universe are more sensitive to light. At the time, this had seemed arbitrary and bizarre to me, but now, it gave me a perfect excuse for why (someone who looks like) Tilly would be wearing sunglasses! </p>
<p>I was soon disappointed to learn that one-way glass isn't actually a real thing that you could make sunglasses out of; what's real are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_mirror"><em>half-silvered</em> mirrors</a> that are deployed with one side in darkness. For good measure, I also added of a pair of <a href="https://thebreastformstore.com/gold-seal-padded-panty/">padded panties</a> from the Breast Form Store to my outfit, another solid buy.</p>
<p>So on the night of Friday 25 November, I threw my <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2230s-2250s)">2250s-era Starfleet uniform</a> in my backpack, put my breastforms and wig and mask in a box, and got on the train to San Francisco. (My ticket to the con was Saturday only, but it's nice to get a hotel room for the night before, and get dressed up in the morning within walking distance of the event, rather than taking the train in costume the day of.) Carrying the box around was slightly awkward, and the thought briefly occured to me that I could summon an internet taxi rather than take the train, but it was already decadent enough that I was getting a hotel room for a local event, and I had recently learned that my part-time contract with my dayjob (which had started in April as a Pareto improvement over me just quitting outright) isn't getting renewed at the end of the year, so I need to learn to be careful with money instead of being a YOLO spendthrift, at least until dayjob IPOs and my shares become liquid.</p>
<p><a id="memoir-of-religious-betrayal"></a>Arguably, just the <em>time</em> was more of a waste than the money. Focusing on <a href="/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/">writing my memoir of religious betrayal</a> has been a stuggle. Not an entirely unsuccessful struggle—the combined draft <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ms.">mss.</a> are sitting at 74,000 words across four posts, which I've been thinking of as parts 2 through 5. (<a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"</a> being part 1.) But having 74,000 words isn't the same thing as being <em>done already</em> and back to the business of being alive, instead of enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife—and even a single Saturday at Fan Expo instead of being holed up writing (or pretending to) puts an upper bound on my committment to life.</p>
<p>Worse, in the twelve-day <em>week</em> between Fan Expo and me getting this boring Diary-like post up about it, OpenAI released <em>two</em> new GPT variants (<a href="https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1597355354433916928">text-davinci-003</a> and <a href="https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/">ChatGPT</a>). It's not a <em>timeline</em> update (and most days, I count myself with those <a href="https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines">sober skeptics who think the world is ending in 2040</a>, not those <em>loonies</em> who think the world is ending in 2027), but it is a suggestion that it would be <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy"><em>more dignified</em></a> for me to finish the memoir <em>now</em> and go on to sieze the possibilities of another definitely-more-than-five-you-lunatics years of life, rather than continuing to mope around as a vengeful ghost, stuck in the past to the very end.</p>
<p>(The draft of part <em>3</em> is basically done and just needs some editing. Maybe I should just publish that first, as one does with blog posts?—rather than waiting until I have the Whole Dumb Story collected, to be optimized end-to-end.)</p>
<p>Anyway, Saturday morning, I got myself masked and padded in all the right places, and suited up to walk from my hotel room to Moscone West for the convention! They had a weirdly cumbersome check-in system (wait in line to get your QR code scanned, then receive a badge, then <em>activate</em> the badge by typing a code printed on it into a website on your phone, then scan the badge to enter the con), and I dropped my phone while I was in line and cracked the screen a bit. But then I was in! Hello, Fan Expo!</p>
<p>And—didn't immediately have anything to do, because conventions are boring. I had gone through the schedule the previous night and written down possibly non-boring events on a page in my pocket Moleskine notebook, but the first (a nostalgic showing of Saturday morning cartoons from the '90s) didn't even start until 1100, and the only ones I really cared about were the <em>Star Trek</em> cosplay rendezvous at 1315, and a photo-op with Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden (best known for their roles as Lt. Cmdr. Data and Dr. Crusher, respectively, on <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em>) at 1520 that I had pre-paid $120 for. I checked out the vendor hall first. Nothing really caught my eye ...</p>
<p>Until I came across a comics table hawking <a href="http://transcatcomics.blogspot.com/"><em>TransCat</em></a>, the "first" (self-aware scare quotes included) transgender superhero. I had to stop and look: just the catchphrase promised an exemplar of everything <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">I'm fighting</a>—not out of hatred, but out of a <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">shared love</a> that <a href="/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/">I think I have</a> the more <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">faithful interpretation</a> of. I opened the cover of one of the displayed issues to peek inside. The art quality was ... not good. "There's so much I could say that doesn't fit in this context," I said to the table's proprietor, whose appearance I will not describe. "Probably not what you're thinking," I added. "Oh no," <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">she</a> said. I didn't want to spend the day carrying anything that didn't fit nicely in my fanny pack, so I left without buying any comics, thinking I might come back later.</p>
<p>I wandered around the con some more (watched some of the cartoons, talked to the guys manning the <em>Star Trek</em> fan society table). Eventually I checked out the third floor, where the celebrity autographs and photo ops were. Spiner and McFadden were there, with no line in front of their tables. I had already paid for the photo op later, but that looked like it was going to be <a href="/2016/Dec/joined/#photo-assembly-line">one of those</a> soulless "pose, click—next fan" assembly-lines, and it felt more human to actually get to <em>talk</em> to the stars for half a minute.</p>
<p>(When I played Ens. Tilly in 2018, I got an autograph and <a href="/images/tilly_cosplay.png">photo with Jonathan Frakes</a>, and got to talk to him for half a minute: I told him that we had covered his work in art history class at the Academy, and that I loved his portrayal of—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Xanatos">David Xanatos</a>.)</p>
<p>I had recently read Spiner's pseudo-autobiographical crime novel <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/10/17/1046397441/brent-spiner-data-fan-fiction-review"><em>Fan Fiction</em></a> about him getting stalked by a deranged fan and wanted to say something intelligent about it, so (my heart pounding) I went over to Spiner's table and paid the $60 autograph fee to the attendant. (If Gates McFadden had written a book, then I hadn't read it, so I didn't have anything intelligent to say to her.)</p>
<p>I told him that I thought the forward to <em>Fan Fiction</em> should have been more specific about which parts were based on a true story. He said, that's the point, that you don't know what's real. I said that I was enjoying it as a decent crime novel, but kept having a reaction to some parts of the form, No way, no <em>way</em> did that actually happen. He asked which parts. I said, you know, the way that the woman hired to be your bodyguard just happens to have a twin sister, and you get romantically involved with <em>both</em> of them, and end up killing the stalker yourself in a dramatic confrontation—</p>
<p>"I killed someone," he said, deadpan.</p>
<p>"Really?" I said.</p>
<p>No, he admitted, but the part about getting sent a pig penis was real.</p>
<p>I gave my name as "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. <em>Discovery</em>", and he signed a page I ripped out of my Moleskine: "To Sylvia", it says, "A fine human!"</p>
<p>As far as my hope of the mask helping me pass as female to others, I didn't really get a sense that I fooled anyone? (Looking at the photographs afterwards, that doesn't feel surprising. <em>Proportions!</em>)</p>
<p>I guess it's not obvious how I would tell in every case? A woman wearing a Wonder Woman costume recognized me as Tilly, enthusiastically complimented me, asked to get a photo of us. She asked where I got my costume from, and I murmured <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07C1LCMSB/">"Amazon."</a> Her friend took the photo, and accepted my phone to take one for me as well. Would that interaction have gone any differently, if I had actually been a woman (just wearing a Starfleet uniform and maybe a wig, with no mask or breastforms or hip pads)?</p>
<p>People at the <em>Star Trek</em> cosplay rendezvous were nice. (The schedule called it a cosplay "meetup", but I'm going with <em>rendezvous</em>, a word that I'm sure I learned from watching <em>The Next Generation</em> as a child.) A woman in a <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(early_2380s)">2380s-era sciences division uniform</a> asked me my name.</p>
<p>"Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. <em>Discovery</em>," I said.</p>
<p>No, I meant, your alter-ego, she said, and I hesitated—I wanted to stay in character (that is, I didn't want to give my (male) name), but some minutes later (after the photo shoot) changed my mind and introduced myself with my real name, and she gave me a card with her <em>Star Trek</em> fan group's name written on the back.</p>
<p><a href="/images/fan_expo_star_trek_meet.jpg"><img src="/images/fan_expo_star_trek_meet.jpg" width="575" style="margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>My wig was coming off at the beginning of the photo shoot, so I went to the bathroom to fix it. (The men's room; I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, <em>&c.</em>) The man who was also in a <em>Discovery</em>-era uniform also wanted a photo, and I ended up explaining the rationalization for my sunglasses to him ("definitely not her analogue from a parallel universe where people are more sensitive to light"—but <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WatsonianVersusDoylist">Doylistically</a> because I'm wearing a mask instead of makeup this year), which he thought was clever.</p>
<p>Maybe I should have tried harder to make friends, instead of mostly just exchanging pleasantries and being in photos? There was a ready-made conversation topic in the form of all the new shows! Would it have been witty and ironic to confess that I don't even like <em>Discovery</em>? (I finally gave up halfway through Season 4; I don't care what happens to these characters anymore.) I guess I was feeling shy? I did later join the Facebook group written on the back of the card I was given.</p>
<p><a href="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg"><img src="/images/photo_op_with_spiner_and_mcfadden.jpg" width="350" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>The photo op with Spiner and McFadden was the assembly-line affair I expected. They had a bit of COVID theater going, in the form of the photo being taken with a transparent barrier between fan and stars. Spiner said, "Sylvia, right?" and I said, "Yeah." Pose, click—next fan.</p>
<p>I did get "ma'am"ed on my way out, so that's something.</p>
<p>At this point, I was kind of tired and bored and wanted to go back to my hotel room and masturbate.</p>
<p>But there was one last thing left to do at Fan Expo. I went to the vendor hall, stopped by a side table and wrote "unremediatedgender.space" on a strip of paper torn out from my Moleskine, then went back to the <em>TransCat</em> table.</p>
<p>I changed my mind, I said (about buying), where does the story start? The proprietor said that Issue 1 was sold out, but that the book Vol. 1 (compiling the first 6 issues plus some bonus content) was available for $25. I'll take it, I said enthusiastically.</p>
<p>And then—there wouldn't be any <em>good</em> way to bring up the thing, except that I felt that I had to try and that I was paying $25 for the privilege—I said awkwardly that I was ... disappointed, that our Society had settled on a "trans women are women" narrative. The proprietor said something about there being more enthusiasm in 2016, but that coming back to conventions after COVID, public opinion seems colder now, that she was worried.</p>
<p>I asked if she had heard of the concept of "autogynephilia." She hadn't.</p>
<p>The proprietor asked if I would like the book signed. I agreed, then hesitated when asked my name. Sensing my discomfort, the proprietor clarified, "Who should I make it out to?"</p>
<p>I said, "Ensign Sylvia Tilly, U.S.S. <em>Discovery</em>."</p>
<p>"Sylvia Tilly! Keep on exploring the final frontier," says the autograph.</p>
<p>Sensing that there really was no way to cross the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances">inferential distance</a> over a transaction in the vendor hall, I said that I had some contrarian opinions, and that I had a blog, handing the proprietor the slip of paper before taking my leave. (As if implicitly proposing a trade, I thought: I'll read yours if you read mine.)</p>
<p>I walked back to my hotel room to get out of the uncomfortable costume—but not fully out of costume, not immediately: I took off the uniform and wig, but left my mask and breastforms. I had packed a hand mirror in my backpack the previous night, so that I could look at my masked face while lying in bed. I appreciated the way the mask really does look "female"; the illusion doesn't depend on a wig to provide the <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">cultural gendered cue</a> of long hair. (Of course; I have long hair in real life.)</p>
<p>I swear it looks worse in photographs than it does in the mirror! Gazing into the hand mirror while feeling up the weight of my size-7 breastforms, it was almost possible to pretend that I was admiring flesh instead of silicone—almost possible to imagine what it would be like to have been transformed into a woman with a shaved head (surely a lesbian) and DD breasts.</p>
<p>I often like masturbating into a condom (no mess, no stress!), but catching the cum with toilet paper works fine, too.</p>
<hr>
<p><a id="transcat-review"></a>Later, I would force myself to read <em>TransCat</em> Vol. 1. I don't want to say it's bad.</p>
<p>I mean, it is bad, but the fact that it's bad, isn't what's bad about it.</p>
<p><a id="knowing-how-that-looks"></a>What's bad is the—deficit of self-awareness? There are views according to which my work is bad. I can imagine various types of critic forcing themselves to read this blog with horror and disappointment, muttering, "Doesn't he" <a href="/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/">(or "Doesn't she", depending on the critic)</a> "know how that <em>looks?</em>" And if nothing else, I aspire to <em>know how it looks</em>.</p>
<p>I don't get the sense that <em>TransCat</em> knows how it looks. Our hero is a teenage boy named Knave (the same first name as our author) in Mountain View, California in the year 200X, who discovers a cat-ears hat that magically transforms him into a girl when worn. While transformed, he—she—fights evildoers, like a pervy guy at Fanime who was covertly taking upskirt photos, or a busybody cop who suddenly turns out to be a lizard person. Knave develops a crush on a lesbian at school named "Chloie" (which I guess is a way you could spell <em>Chloë</em> if you don't know how to type a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)">diaeresis</a>), and starts wearing the cat hat more often (taking on "Cat" as a girl-mode name), hoping to get closer to Chloie. Cat and Chloie find they enjoy spending time together, until one day, when Cat makes some physical advances—and discovers, to her surprise, that Chloie has a penis. Chloie punches her and runs off.</p>
<p>... how can I explain the problems with this?</p>
<p>Superficially, this comic was clearly made for <em>people like me</em>. Who better to appreciate a story about a teenage boy in the San Francisco Bay Area of 200X who can magically change sex, than someone who remembers <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity">being a teenage boy in the San Francisco Bay Area of 200X who fantasized about magically changing sex</a>? (Okay, I was <em>East</em> Bay; this is <em>South</em> Bay. Totally different.)</p>
<p>But I can't, appreciate it, other than as an anthropological exhibit—not just because of the bad art, or the bad font choices (broadly construed to include the use of ALLCAPS for emphasis rather than <strong>bold</strong> or <em>italics</em>), or the numerous uncorrected spelling errors, or the lack of page numbers, or the unnecessarily drawn-out pop-culture references that I didn't get—but because the author is living inside an ideological fever dream <em>that doesn't know it's a dream</em>.</p>
<p>The foreward by Tara Madison Avery mentions the subset of transfolk "whose gender journey involves hormone replacement therapy." The "episode zero" primer tells us that the hat brings out our protagonist's "True Form". "[A]m I a straight boy with a girl on the inside? Or am I a gay girl with a boy on the outside?" Knave wonders. When Chloie's former bandmate misgenders her behind her back, Cat tells him off: "Chloie is a woman, even without the pills and surgery! You don't get to decide her identity based on her looks, or what she did to attain them!"</p>
<p>And just—what does any of that <em>mean?</em> What is an "identity"? How can you "be trans" <em>without hormone replacement therapy?</em> I was pretty social-justicey as a teenager, too, but somehow my indoctrination never included this <em>nonsense</em>: when I was a teenage boy fantasizing about being a teenage girl, I'm pretty sure <em>I knew I was pretending</em>.</p>
<p>Is it an East Bay <em>vs.</em> South Bay thing? Is it of critical importance whether the <em>X</em> in the year 200X equals '4' or '8'? Or, as a friend of the blog suggests, is the relevant difference not when you grew up, but whether you <em>left</em> social justice, or continued to be <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">shaped by the egregore</a> through the 2010s?—the author anachronistically projecting elements of the current year's ideology onto the 200Xs that we both experienced.</p>
<p>And just—there are <em>so</em> many interesting things you could do with this premise, that you can only do if you admit that biological sex is real and "identity" is not. (Otherwise, why would you need the magic hat?) The situation where Knave-as-Cat is pursuing Chloie as a lesbian, but Chloie doesn't know that Cat is Knave—that's interesting! I want to know how the story would have gone, if Chloie (cis) found out that her girlfriend was actually a boy wearing a magic hat: would she accept it, or would she feel betrayed? Why would you throw away that story, but for the ethnic narcissism of an <a href="/2021/Sep/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic/">"everyone is [our sexual minority]"</a> dynamic?</p>
<p>And if you <em>do</em> want to go the ethnic narcissism route and make Chloie trans, why assert that Cat and Chloie are equally valid "even without the pills and surgery"? Isn't there a sense in which Cat's identity is more legitimate on account of the magic? How would Chloie (trans) react if she found out that her cis girlfriend was actually a boy wearing a magic hat? Would she <em>die of jealousy?</em> Would she bargain to try to borrow the hat—or even just steal it for herself?</p>
<p>(The conclusion to Issue 1 establishes that the hat's sex-change magic doesn't work on Knave's male friend, at which our hero(ine) infers that "it was meant for me." But is the power sponsoring the hat as kind to other <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">(sufficiently)</a> gender-dysphoric males? If so, I'll take back my claims about "identity" being meaningless: whether the hat works for you would be an <em>experimental test</em> demonstrating who is really trans.)</p>
<p>My favorite scene is probably the one where, after watching <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club"><em>Fight Club</em></a> at Cat's behest, Chloie admits that it wasn't bad, but is cynical about the educated middle-class bros of Project Mayhem thinking themselves oppressed by Society as if they were an actual persecuted minority. Cat is impressed: "you actually have stuff to say about [the film] too! You can be critical about it without trashing it. That's kinda rare". And maybe it is, <em>kinda?</em> But just—there's so much <em>further</em> you can go in that direction, than basic bitch social-justice criticism of basic bro movies. It's like putting "Microsoft Word skills" on your résumé (in the 200Xs, before everyone started using Google Docs). It's not that it's bad to know Word, but the choice to mention it says something about your conceptual horizons. <em>Do you know how that looks?</em></p>Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels2022-09-25T23:20:00-07:002022-09-25T23:20:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-09-25:/2022/Sep/friendship-practices-of-the-secret-sharing-plain-speech-valley-squirrels/<p>In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers …</p><p>In the days of auld lang syne on Earth-that-was, in the Valley of Plain Speech in the hinterlands beyond the Lake of Ambiguous Fortune, there lived a population of pre-intelligent squirrels. Historical mammologists have classified them into two main subspecies: the west-valley ground squirrels and the east-valley tree squirrels—numbers 9792 and 9794 in Umi's grand encyclopædia of Plain Speech creatures, but not necessarily respectively: I remember the numbers, but I can never remember which one is which.</p>
<p>Like many pre-intelligent creatures, both subspecies of Plain Speech Valley squirrels were highly social animals, with adaptations for entering stable repeated-cooperation relations with conspecifics: <em>friendships</em> being the technical term. Much of the squirrels' lives concerned the sharing of information about how to survive: how to fashion simple tools for digging up nuts, the best running patterns for fleeing predators, what kind of hole or tree offered the best shelter, <em>&c.</em> Possession of such information was valuable, and closely guarded: squirrels would only share secrets with their closest friends and family. Maneuvering to be told secrets, and occasionally to spread fake secrets to rivals, was the subject of much drama and intrigue in their lives.</p>
<p>At this, some novice students of historical mammology inquire: why be secretive? Surely if the squirrels were to pool their knowledge together, and build on each other's successes, they could accumulate ever-greater mastery over their environment, and possibly even spark their world's ascension?!</p>
<p>To which it is replied: evolution wouldn't necessarily select for that. Survival-relevant opportunities are often rivalrous: two squirrels can't both eat the same nut, or hide in the same one-squirrel-width hole. As it was put in a joke popular amongst the west-valley ground squirrels (according to Harrod's post-habilitation thesis on pre-intelligence in the days of auld lang syne): I don't need to outrun the <em>predator</em>, I just need to outrun my <em>conspecifics</em>. Thus, secrecy instincts turned out to be adaptive: a squirrel keeping a valuable secret to itself and its friends would gain more fitness than a squirrel who shared its knowledge freely with anysquirrel who could listen.</p>
<p>A few students inquire further: but that's a <em>contingent</em> fact about the distribution of squirrel-survival-relevant opportunities in the Valley of of Plain Speech in the days of auld lang syne, right? A different distribution of adaptive problems might induce a less secretive psychology?</p>
<p>To which it is replied: yes, well, there's a reason the ascension of Earth-that-was would be sparked by the <em>H. sapiens</em> line of hominids some millions of years later, rather than by the Plain Speech subspecies 9792 and 9794.</p>
<p>Another adaptive information-processing instinct in subspecies 9792 and 9794 was a taste for novelty. Not all information is equally valuable. A slight variation on a known secret was less valuable than a completely original secret the likes of which had never been hitherto suspected. Among pre-intelligent creatures generally, novelty-seeking instincts are more convergent than secrecy instincts, but with considerable variation in strength depending on the partial-derivative matrix of the landscape of adaptive problems; Dripler's Pre-Intelligent Novelty-Seeking Scale puts subspecies 9792 and 9794 in the 76th percentile on this dimension.</p>
<p>The coincidental conjunction of a friendship-forming instinct, a novel-secret-seeking instinct, <em>and</em> a nearby distinct subspecies with similar properties, led to some unusual behavior patterns. Given the different survival-relevant opportunities in their respective habitats, each subspecies predominantly hoarded <em>different</em> secrets: the secret of how to jump and land on the thinner branches of the reedy pilot tree was of little relevance to the daily activity of a west-valley ground squirrel, but the secret of how to bury nuts without making it obvious that the ground had been upturned was of little import to an east-valley tree squirrel.</p>
<p>But the squirrels' <em>novelty-seeking instincts</em> didn't track such distinctions. Secrets from one subspecies thus functioned as a superstimulus to the other subspecies on account of being so exotic, thus making cross-subspecies friendships particularly desirable and sought-after—although not without difficulties.</p>
<p>Particular squirrels had a subspace of their behavior that characterized them as different from other individuals of the same age and sex: <em>personality</em> being the technical term (coined in Dunbar's volume on social systems). The friendship-forming instinct was most stimulated between squirrels with similar personalities, and the two subspecies had different personality distributions that resulted in frequent incompatibilities: for example, west-valley ground squirrels tended to have a more anxious disposition (reflecting the need to be alert to predators on open terrain), whereas east-valley tree squirrels tended to have a more rambunctious nature (as was useful for ritual leaf fights, but which tended to put west-valley ground squirrels on edge).</p>
<p>Really, the typical west-valley ground squirrel and the typical east-valley tree squirrel wouldn't have been friends at all, if not for the tantalizing allure of exotic secrets. Thus, cross-subspecies friendships tended to be successfully forged much less often than they were desired.</p>
<p>And so, many, many times in the days of auld lang syne, a squirrel in a burrow or a tree would sadly settle down to rest for the night, lamenting, "I wish I had a special friend. Someone who understood me. Someone to share my secrets with."</p>
<p>And beside them, a friend or a mate would attempt to comfort them, saying, "But <em>I'm</em> your friend. <em>I</em> understand you. You can share your secrets with <em>me</em>."</p>
<p>"That's not what I meant."</p>The Signaling Hazard Objection2022-09-17T18:00:00-07:002022-09-17T18:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-09-17:/2022/Sep/the-signaling-hazard-objection/<p>A common <a href="https://blog.reaction.la/culture/gay-needs-to-be-suppressed/">far-right objection to tolerance of male homosexuality</a> is that it constitutes a "signaling hazard": if Society legitimizes the gays rather than oppressing them, that interferes with normal men expressing friendly affection for each other without being seen as potentially gay, which is bad for the fabric of Society …</p><p>A common <a href="https://blog.reaction.la/culture/gay-needs-to-be-suppressed/">far-right objection to tolerance of male homosexuality</a> is that it constitutes a "signaling hazard": if Society legitimizes the gays rather than oppressing them, that interferes with normal men expressing friendly affection for each other without being seen as potentially gay, which is bad for the fabric of Society, which depends on strong bonds between men who trust each other. (Presumably, latent homosexual tendencies would still exist in some men even if forbidden, but gestures of affection between men wouldn't be seen as potentially escalating to homosexual relations, if homosexual relations were considered unthinkable and to be discouraged, with violence if necessary.)</p>
<p>People who grew up in the current year generally don't think much of this argument: why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight? What's wrong with being gay?</p>
<p>The argument might be easier to understand if we can find other examples of "signaling hazard" dynamics. For example, well-read people in the current year are often aware of various facts that they're careful never to acknowledge in public for fear of being seen as right-wing (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, <em>&c.</em>). In this context, the analogous dismissal, "Why do you care if someone isn't sure you're progressive? What's wrong with being right-wing?", doesn't seem compelling. <em>Of course</em>, we care; <em>of course</em>, there's something wrong with it.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.gwern.net/Modus">One person's <em>modus ponens</em> is another's <em>modus tollens</em></a>; the implications of the analogy could be read in two ways. Maybe it's especially important that we repress right-wing ideologies, so that good progressive people can afford speak more freely among ourselves without being confused for one of the bad guys.</p>
<p>Or maybe the libs got it right the first time, and it's possible to just—defy the signaling incentives? Why <em>do</em> you care what other people think?</p>The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for a More Detailed Causal Model2022-07-08T18:00:00-07:002022-07-08T18:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-07-08:/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/<p>A lot of people tend to balk when first hearing about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard's_transsexualism_typology">two-type taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism</a>. What, one scoffs, you're saying <em>all</em> trans women are exactly one of these two things? It seems at once both too simple and too specific.</p>
<p>In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology …</p><p>A lot of people tend to balk when first hearing about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard's_transsexualism_typology">two-type taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism</a>. What, one scoffs, you're saying <em>all</em> trans women are exactly one of these two things? It seems at once both too simple and too specific.</p>
<p>In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology is <em>complicated</em>; every human is their own unique snowflake. But it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique <em>maximum-entropy</em> snowflake" theory. In order to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">compress our observations</a> of the world we see, we end up distilling our observations into <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">categories</a>, clusters, diagnoses, <a href="https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/">taxons</a>: no one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype <em>exactly</em>, but <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions">the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions</a> like <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/">"comas"</a> or "depression" or "borderline personality disorder"—or "autogynephilia".</p>
<p>Concepts and theories are good to the extent that they can "pay for" their complexity by making more accurate predictions. How much more complexity is worth how much more accuracy? Arguably, it depends! General relativity has superseded Newtonian classical mechanics as the ultimate theory of how gravity works, but if you're not dealing with velocities approaching the speed of light, Newton still makes <em>very good</em> predictions: it's pretty reasonable to still talk about Newtonian gravitation being "true" if it makes the math easier on you, and the more complicated math doesn't give appreciably different answers to the problems you're interested in.</p>
<p>Moreover, if relativity hasn't been invented yet, it makes sense to stick with Newtonian gravity as the <em>best</em> theory you have <em>so far</em>, even if there are a few anomalies <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury">like the precession of Mercury</a> that it struggles to explain.</p>
<p>The same general principles of reasoning apply to psychological theories, even though psychology is a much more difficult subject matter and our available theories are correspondingly much poorer and vaguer. There's no way to make precise quantitative predictions about a human's behavior the way we can about the movements of the planets, but we still know <em>some</em> things about humans, which get expressed as high-level generalities that nevertheless admit many exceptions: if you don't have the complicated true theory that would account for everything, then simple theories plus noise are better than <em>pretending not to have a theory</em>. As you learn more, you can try to pin down a more complicated theory that explains some of the anomalies that looked like "noise" to the simpler theory.</p>
<p>What does this look like for psychological theories? In the crudest form, when we notice a pattern of traits that tend to go together, we give it a name. Sometimes people go through cycles of elevated arousal and hyperactivity, punctuated by pits of depression. After seeing the same distinctive patterns in many such cases, doctors decided to reify it as a diagnosis, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder">"bipolar disorder"</a>.</p>
<p>If we notice further patterns <em>within</em> the group of cases that make up a category, we can spit it up into sub-categories: for example, a diagnosis of bipolar I requires a full-blown manic episode, but hypomania and a major depressive episode qualify one for bipolar II.</p>
<p>Is the two-type typology of bipolar disorder a good theory? Are bipolar I and bipolar II "really" different conditions, or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition, part of a "bipolar spectrum" along with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia">cyclothymia</a>? In our current state of knowledge, this is debatable, but if our understanding of the etiology of bipolar disorder were to advance, and we were to find evidence that that bipolar I has a different underlying <em>causal structure</em> from bipolar II with decision-relevant consequences (like responding to different treatments), that would support a policy of thinking and talking about them as mostly separate things—even while they have enough in common to call them both kinds of "bipolar". The simple high-level category ("bipolar disorder") is a useful approximation in the absence of knowing the sub-category (bipolar I <em>vs.</em> II), and the subcategory is a useful approximation in the absence of knowing the patient's detailed case history.</p>
<p>With a <em>sufficiently</em> detailed causal story, you could even dispense with the high-level categories altogether and directly talk about the consequences of different neurotransmitter counts or whatever—but lacking that supreme precise knowledge, it's useful to sum over the details into high-level categories, and meaningful to debate whether a one-type or two-type taxonomy is a better statistical fit to the underlying reality whose full details we don't know.</p>
<hr>
<p>In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, we notice a pattern where androphilic and non-androphilic trans women seem to be different from each other—not just in their sexuality, but also in their age of dysphoria onset, interests, and personality.</p>
<p>This claim is most famously associated with the work of <a href="/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf">Ray Blanchard</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen">J. Michael Bailey</a>, and <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html">Anne Lawrence</a>, who argue that there are two discrete types of male-to-female transsexualism: an autogynephilic type (basically, <a href="/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf">men who love women and want to become what they love</a>), and an androphilic/homosexual type (basically, the extreme right tail of feminine gay men).</p>
<p>But many authors have noticed the same bimodal clustering of traits under various names, <a href="/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/">while disagreeing about the underlying causality</a>. <a href="/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf">Veale, Clarke, and Lomax</a> attribute the differences to whether defense mechanisms are used to suppress a gender-variant identity. <a href="http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm">Anne Vitale</a> identifies distinct groups (Group One and Group Three, in her terminology), but hypothesizes that the difference is due to degree of prenatal androgenization. Julia Serano <a href="/papers/serano-agp-a_scientific_review_feminist_analysis_and_alternative.pdf">concedes that "the correlations that Blanchard and other researchers prior to him described generally hold true"</a>, but denies their causal or taxonometric significance.</p>
<p>Is a two type typology of male-to-female transsexualism a good theory? Is it "really" two different conditions (following Blanchard <em>et al.</em>), or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition (following <em>e.g.</em> Veale <em>et al.</em>)?</p>
<p>When the question is posed that way—if I have to choose between a one-type and a two-type theory—then I think the two-type theory is superior. But I also think we can do better and say more about the underlying causal structure that the simple two-types story is approximating, and hopefully explain anomalous cases that look like "noise" to the simple theory.</p>
<p>In the language of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph">causal graphs</a> (where the arrows point from cause to effect), here's what I think is going on:</p>
<p><img alt="transition causal graph" src="/images/transition_dag.svg"></p>
<p>Let me explain. </p>
<p>What are the reasons a male-to-female transition might seem like a good idea to someone? <em>Why</em> would a male be interested in undergoing medical interventions to resemble a female and live socially as a woman? I see three prominent reasons, depicted as the parents of the "transition" node in a graph.</p>
<p>First and most obviously, femininity: if you happen to be a male with unusually female-typical psychological traits, you might fit into the social world better as a woman rather than as an anomalously effeminate man.</p>
<p>Second—second is hard to quickly explain if you're not already familiar with the phenomenon, but basically, autogynephilia is very obviously a real thing; <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">I wrote about my experiences with it in a previous post</a>. Crucially, autogynephilic identification with the <em>idea</em> of being female, is distinct from naturally feminine behavior, of which other people <a href="/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/">know it when they see it</a>.</p>
<p>Third—various cultural factors. You can't be trans if your culture doesn't have a concept of "being trans", and the concepts <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">and incentives</a> that your culture offers, make a difference as to how you turn out. Many people who think of themselves as trans women in today's culture, could very well be "the same" as people who thought of themselves as drag queens or occasional cross-dressers 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. (Either "the same" in terms of underlying dispositions, or, in many cases, just literally the same people.)</p>
<p>If there are multiple non-mutually-exclusive reasons why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone, then the decision of whether to transition could take the form of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_model">liability–threshold model</a>: males transition if the <em>sum</em> of their levels of femininity, autogynephilia, and culture-related-trans-disposition exceed some threshold (given some sensible scheme for quantifying and adding (!) these traits).</p>
<p>You might ask: okay, but then where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_network">Bayesian network</a>, there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm claiming that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) could also be approximated a two-cluster model: <em>most</em> trans women high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and <em>vice versa</em>, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types".</p>
<p>Why? It has to do with the parents of femininity and autogynephilia in the graph. Suppose that gay men are more feminine than straight men, and autogynephilia is the result of being straight plus having an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_target_location_error">"erotic target location error"</a>, in which men who are attracted to something (in this case, women), are also attracted to the idea of <em>being</em> that thing.</p>
<p>Then the value of the sexual-orientation node is pushing the values of its children in <em>opposite</em> directions: gay males are more feminine and less autogynephilic, and straight males are less feminine and more autogynephilic, leading to two broadly different etiological trajectories by which transition might seem like a good idea to someone—even while it's not the case that the two types have <em>nothing</em> in common. For example, this model predicts that among autogynephilic males, those who transition are going to be selected for higher levels of femininity compared to those who don't transition—and in that aspect, their stories are going to have <em>something</em> in common with their androphilic sisters, even if the latter are broadly <em>more</em> feminine.</p>
<p>(Of course, it's also the case that the component factors in a liability-threshold model would negatively correlate among the population past a threshold, due to the effect of conditioning on a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collider_(statistics)">collider</a>, as in the famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox">Berkson's paradox</a>. But I'm claiming that the degree of bimodality induced by the effects of sexual orientation is substantially greater than that accounted for by the conditioning-on-a-collider effect.)</p>
<p>An advantage of this kind of <em>probabilistic</em> model is that it gives us a <em>causal</em> account of the broad trends we see, while also not being too "brittle" in the face of a complex world. The threshold graphical model explains why the two-type taxonomy looks so compelling as a first approximation, without immediately collapsing the moment we meet a relatively unusual individual who doesn't seem to quite fit the strictest interpretation of the classical two-type taxonomy. For example, when we meet a trans woman who's not very feminine <em>and</em> has no history of autogynephilia, we can predict that in her case, there were probably unusually intense cultural factors (<em>e.g.</em>, internalized misandry) making transition seem like a salient option (and therefore that her analogue in previous generations wouldn't have been transsexual), instead of predicting that she doesn't exist. (It's possible that what Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence conceived of as a androphilic <em>vs.</em> autogynephilic taxonomy, may be better thought of as an androphilic <em>vs.</em> not-otherwise-specified taxonomy, if feminine androphiles form a distinct cluster, but it's not easy to disambiguate autogynephilia from all other possible reasons for not-overtly-feminine males to show up at the gender clinic.)</p>
<p>Care must be taken to avoid abusing the probabilistic nature of the model to make excuses to avoid falsification. The theory that can explain everything <em>with equal probability</em>, explains nothing: if you find yourself saying, "Oh, this case is an exception" too <em>often</em>, you do need to revise your theory. But a "small" number of "exceptions" can actually be fine: a theory that says a coin is biased to come up Heads 80% of the time, isn't falsified by a single Tails (and is in fact <em>confirmed</em> if that Tails happens 20% of the time).</p>
<p>At this point, you might ask: okay, but why do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is <em>true</em>?</p>
<p>Ultimately, the reader cannot abdicate responsibility to think it through and decide for herself ... but it seems to <em>me</em> that all six arrows in the graph are things that we separately have a pretty large weight of evidence for, either in published scientific studies, or just informally looking at the world.</p>
<p>The femininity→transition arrow is obvious. The sexual orientation→femininity arrow (representing the fact that gay men are more feminine than straight men), besides being stereotypical folk knowledge, has also been extensively documented, for example by <a href="/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf">Lippa</a> and by <a href="/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf">Bailey and Zucker</a>. Evidence for the "v-structure" between sexual orientation, erotic target location erroneousness, and autogynephilia has been <a href="/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf">documented by Anne Lawrence</a>: furries and amputee-wannabes who want to emulate the objects of their attraction, "look like" "the same thing" as autogynephiles, but pointed at a less conventional erotic target than women. The autogynephilia–transition concordance has been <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/four-out-of-five/">documented</a> <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/MtF/search?q=fetish&restrict_sr=on">by</a> <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-5182-2">many</a> <a href="http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/05/reconceptualizing-autogynephilia-as_26.html">authors</a>, and I claim the direction of causality is obvious. (If you want to argue that it goes the other way—that some underlying "gender identity" causes both autogynephilia and, separately, the desire to transition, then why does it usually not work that way for androphiles?) The cultural-factors→transition arrow is obvious if you haven't been living under a rock for the last decade.</p>
<p>This has been a qualitative summary of my current thinking. I'm very bullish on thinking in graphical models rather than discrete taxons being the way to go, but it would be a lot more work to pin down all these claims more rigorously—or, to the extent that my graph is wrong, to figure out the correct (or, <em>a</em> more correct, less wrong) graph instead.</p>
<p><em>(Thanks to the immortal <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/">Tailcalled</a> for discussion.)</em></p>An Egoist Faith2022-06-24T17:50:00-07:002022-06-24T17:50:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-06-24:/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/<p><em>(Previously: <a href="/2022/Apr/backlog-metablogging-april-2022/">"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 ..."</a>)</em></p>
<p>People mostly don't do things. <a href="/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/">They really don't.</a> In order to defy fate …</p><p><em>(Previously: <a href="/2022/Apr/backlog-metablogging-april-2022/">"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 ..."</a>)</em></p>
<p>People mostly don't do things. <a href="/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/">They really don't.</a> In order to defy fate and do a thing, you need to Believe in what you're doing, because if you don't Believe, then your motivational system will direct your time and attention to something, anything else that it can Believe in more, like <a href="https://teamwoodgames.com/"><em>Super Auto Pets</em></a>.</p>
<p>Thus, it's not possible for a writer to think something like, "I just want to be <em>done</em> with this stupid memoir of religious betrayal that no one should care about, in order to get the Whole Dumb Story out of my system so that I can be over it and move on with my afterlife and maybe work on something that matters instead." (Though someone who <em>self-identifies</em> as a writer can think that.) You can't write in order to be <em>done</em>. It might be possible to produce text under that motivation—though I don't think I've seen it happen myself—but that would only be language-model output, not <em>writing</em>.</p>
<p>If all you really wanted was to be done, you could just—decide to be done, without writing. Just walk away, and let everything left unsaid, <em>remain</em> unsaid. If that doesn't seem satisfactory, it's probably because of some deep, uncancellable conviction that the memoir is <em>not</em> stupid, that the religious leaders <em>did</em> betray you and their faith, that someone <em>should</em> care, that telling the Whole Dumb Story—telling it <em>right</em>, so that every graf <em>sings</em> and hits the exact notes of righteous fury and deconfusion and penetrating portraiture—is <em>part</em> of your life, and not a prerequisite to indulging the part that comes after.</p>
<p>Even if you have to grant, without hesitating, that there <em>is</em> an obvious sense in which these issues are not "important" in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't give you the obligation or even the <em>option</em> to work on something that matters instead. You could produce text that you identify as being "on" something that matters, but that's not <em>work</em>—it's predictably not going to be work <em>that matters</em> on something that matters, which can only be fueled by <a href="/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/">a power born of having Something to Protect</a>. You can't <em>realistically</em> do work that matters out of resignation, during a reasonably comfortable afterlife after having been taken off the game board that really mattered <em>to you</em>, however "unimportant" it is to ulteriority or the Powers that be.</p>
<p>The only way out is through. If I <em>am</em> going to pivot to work on important things, it's going to be after I've <em>stopped thinking that this is already my afterlife</em>. Only after I've told my Story—not to get it over with, but because I Believe that it matters.</p>Comment on a Scene from Planecrash: "Crisis of Faith"2022-06-12T20:00:00-07:002022-06-12T20:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-06-12:/2022/Jun/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith/<p>Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism">"empathic inference"</a> of imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits">alleged aliens or AIs that <em>just happen</em> act like humans</a>, or allegedly foreign cultures that <em>just happen</em> to share …</p><p>Realistic worldbuilding is a difficult art: unable to model what someone else would do except by the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism">"empathic inference"</a> of imagining oneself in that position, authors tend to embarrass themselves writing <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits">alleged aliens or AIs that <em>just happen</em> act like humans</a>, or allegedly foreign cultures that <em>just happen</em> to share all of the idiosyncratic taboos of the author's own culture. The manifestations of this can be very subtle, even to authors who know about the trap.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/board_sections/703"><em>Planecrash</em></a>, a collaborative roleplaying fiction principally by Iarwain (a pen name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and Lintamande, our protagonist, Keltham, hails from <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan">dath ilan</a>, a smarter, more rational, and better-coordinated alternate version of Earth. Keltham has somehow survived his apparent death and woken up in the fantasy world of <a href="https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Golarion">Golarion</a>, and sets about uplifting the natives using knowledge from his more advanced civilization.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/posts/5977">the "Crisis of Faith" thread</a>, Keltham has just arrived in the country of Osirion. While much better than his last host nation (don't ask), Keltham is dismayed at its patriarchal culture in which women typically are not educated and cannot own property, and is considering his options for reforming the culture in conjunction with sharing his civilization's knowledge. Having been advised to survey what native women think of their plight <em>before</em> seeking to upend their social order, <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817402#reply-1817402">Keltham asks an middle-aged woman</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Suppose some dreadful meddling foreigner came in and told Osirion that its laws had to be <em>the same for men and women</em>, and halflings and tieflings and elves too, but men and women are the main focus here. You can make a law that the person with higher Wisdom gets to be in charge of the household; you can make a law about asking people under truthspell if they've ever gotten drunk and hurt somebody; you can't make any law that talks about whether or not somebody has a penis. You can talk about whether somebody has a child, but not whether that person was mother or father, the child girl or boy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the conversation that follows, the woman suggests military conscription as a legitimate reason for why the law might need to discriminate on sex. Keltham suggests, "Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it."</p>
<p>... and that's the part that broke my suspension of disbelief in Keltham being a realistic portrayal of someone who grew up in dath ilan as it has been described to us, rather than being written by people who live in Berkeley in the current year who don't know how to think outside of their own culture's assumptions.</p>
<p>To be clear, it makes sense that Keltham feels bad for the women of Orision, who seem so much less self-actualized than the women of his world. It makes sense that he wants to smash the patriarchy, and reform their sexist customs about education and property.</p>
<p>But the <em>specific</em> way in which he's formulating the problem—that the law should be "<em>the same for men and women</em>, and halflings and tieflings and elves too"—seems distinctively American. The idea that the government can't discriminate by race or sex as a <em>principle</em> (as contrasted to most laws happening to not refer to race or sex because those categories happen to not be relevant to that specific law) is a specific form of Earth-craziness that only makes sense as a reaction to other Earth-craziness; it's not something you would ever spontaneously invent or think was a good idea if you <em>actually</em> came from a 140 IQ Society that thoroughly educated everyone in probability theory as normative reasoning. Let me explain.</p>
<p>Keltham is, of course, correct that if you have specific information about an individual's traits, that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority">screens off</a> any probabilistic guesses you might have made about those traits knowing only the person's demographic category. Once you measure someone's height, the fact that men are taller than women on average with an effect size of about 1.5 standard deviations is no longer relevant to the question of that person's height. (As the saying goes out of dath ilan, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query">hug the query</a>!) In very many situations, if there's a cost associated with acquiring more specific individuating information that renders information from demographic base rates irrelevant, you should pay that cost in order to get the more specific information and therefore make better decisions.</p>
<p>But crucially, getting individuating information is an <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values">instrumental rather than a terminal value</a>; you should do it <em>when and because</em> it improves your decisions, not because of some alleged principle that you're not allowed to make probabilistic inferences off someone's race or sex. Probability theory doesn't have any built-in concept of "protected classes." On pain of paradox, Bayesians <em>must</em> condition on all available information. If groups differ in decision-relevant traits, <em>of course</em> you should treat members of those groups differently! What we call "discrimination" in America on Earth is actually just Bayesian reasoning; P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E) doesn't <em>stop being true</em> when H happens to be "I should hire this candidate" and E happens to be "The candidate is a halfling".</p>
<p>Furthermore, it's not obvious that the law should behave any differently in this respect than a private individual: is Governance supposed to be <em>less</em> Bayesian <em>because it's Governance</em>?! (Although, perhaps there's a distinction between the "law" and "public policy" functions of Governance, with the former laying out timeless rights and principles, whereas day-to-day decisions about the empirical world are farmed out to the latter?)</p>
<p>Some implications: if there's a <em>cost</em> associated with taking individual measurements, and the cost exceeds the amount you would save by making better decisions, then you shouldn't take the measurements. If your measurements have <em>error</em>, then your estimate of the true value of the trait being measured <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean">regresses to the group mean</a> to some quantitative extent. Again, all this just falls out of <em>ordinary</em> Bayesian decision theory, which continues to work even when some of the hypotheses are about groups of people.</p>
<p>If this still seems counterintuitive, it may help to consider that from the standpoint of Just Doing Bayesian Decision Theory, the distinction between "information from demographic group membership" and "information from individual measurements" isn't fundamental. The reason it seems unjust to notice race when you can just look at an individual's Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, is because the relationship between race and any actual decision you might care about is merely statistical: it's not fair to always look to the orc if you need someone in your party to lift a fallen tree, just because orcs are stronger than other races <em>on average</em>, because it could easily be the case that this <em>particular</em> orc is less suited to the task than other party members.</p>
<p>But the relationship between "measured traits" and any actual decision you might care about <em>is also merely statistical</em>. The reason we have a concept of "Intelligence" is because it turns out that people's performances on various mental tasks happen to positively correlate with each other, but that's just <em>on average</em>: it could easily be the case that this particular Intelligence 18 person is less suited to a particular task than some Intelligence 14 person. <em>Mathematically</em>, it's the same issue.</p>
<p>We don't typically <em>think</em> of it as the same issue here in America on Earth. People do sometimes complain about inappropriate reliance on faulty "individual trait" proxies: that <a href="/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/">holding a college degree isn't the same thing as being educated</a>, that job interviews aren't the same thing as job performance, that IQ is not intelligence. But the objection doesn't pack the same moral force in our culture, as can be seen by how often complaints about "individual" proxies are <em>justified in terms of</em> their effects on demographic groups, as when it is argued that <a href="https://shecancode.io/blog/its-time-to-end-whiteboard-interviews-for-software-engineers">"whiteboard" coding tests are bad for diversity</a>, or that <a href="https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing">IQ is racist</a>.</p>
<p>The explanation for the difference in intuitions is as much political as it is moral. On account of being visible clusters in a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">"thick" subspace of configuration space</a> (having many different correlates, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy">even if the effect size along any one dimension may not be very large</a>), race and sex are <em>salient</em> as <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">markers for coordination</a>. Groupings made on the basis of less visible and lower-dimensional traits, like "People with Intelligence 14", don't form a natural "interest group" in the same way, even if the lower-dimensional trait is more decision-relevant in many contexts. Conflict between interest groups in a democratic Society like America creates memetic selection pressure for "equality" memes that deny the existence of non-superficial group differences, as <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts">the natural Schelling point for preventing group conflicts</a>. It's an idea born of distrust in reasoning in an adversarial environment: if you let people <em>make probabilistic inferences</em> using race or sex as inputs, they might motivatedly try to add <em>bad</em> inferences to Society's shared maps that would give their own demographic an advantage in conflicts. It's safer to nip such Shenanigans in the bud by disallowing the whole class of thought to begin with: can't oppress people on the basis of race if race <em>doesn't exist!</em></p>
<p>But Keltham isn't <em>from</em> America; you'd expect his thoughts to optimized for <em>solving problems</em>, not disallowing Shenanigans. Everything we've been told about dath ilan emphasizes that they should be collectively smart enough not to fall into this <em>crazy</em> trap of political incentives making a certain class of correct Bayesian updates socially taboo in order to avert other social ills; the Keepers should have pre-emptively done the analysis in the preceding paragraph <em>without</em> having to empirically see it eat their Society's sanity, and incorporated the appropriate counter-memes in their rationality training for children. To the dath ilani intuition, then, the quantitative extent to which the statement "It's wrong to make <em>X</em> decision about someone just because they're <em>Y</em>" makes sense, depends quantitatively on how strongly <em>Y</em> predicts the outcomes of <em>X</em>. Whether <em>Y</em> is an "individual trait" like having Intelligence 18 or a demographic category like being female <em>does not matter</em>.</p>
<p>This is also how American people's intuitions work, too, in contexts where their <a href="https://quillette.com/2018/02/07/equalitarianism-progressive-bias/">paranoid egalitarian meliorist</a> memetic antibodies haven't been activated. Consider how the text of <em>Planecrash</em> itself repeatedly contrasts Keltham to everyone else in the world of Golarion. No one (neither Watsonianly in the text, nor Doylistically in various discussions of the text on Discord) is shy about saying that Keltham is special in this setting <em>because he's dath ilani</em>. We don't insist on talking about how Keltham is smart <em>and</em> knows about probability theory <em>and</em> knows about chemistry <em>and</em> doesn't know about Golarionian theology <em>and</em> is accustomed to a high material standard of living <em>and</em> is squeamish about seeing slave markets, as if these were separate, isolated facts about Keltham as an idiosyncratic individual. We connect these facts to Keltham's nationality even though, if you look, there are surely <em>also</em> natives of Golarion who are smart (to some quantitative extent) and know about chemistry (to some quantitative extent) and disapprove of slavery (to some quantitative extent), because our whole high-dimensional picture of what Keltham <em>is</em>—comprising many, many traits to their respective quantitative extents—is, in fact, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water"><em>causally downstream</em> of the "essential" fact</a> of his having grown up in another world. It's either not bigoted to <em>notice</em>, or a cognitive system requires some amount of "bigotry" in order to function.</p>
<p>However, just because noticing group differences is theoretically sound, doesn't mean it's always the right thing to focus on. Pragmatically, might it not be the case in practice, that statistical group differences are small enough, and that individual trait measurements are cheap and reliable enough, such that "don't discriminate by race or sex" is a useful <em>heuristic</em>?</p>
<p>It's an empirical issue—but sure, very often, yes. For most jobs—especially most jobs in industrialized Societies like dath ilan or America—"always test the individual's aptitude, never use sex as a proxy" is a fine rule, because most jobs primarily rely on human general intelligence: there was no <em>dentistry</em> in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and thus there's no reason why women or men should make better dentists. In domains where sex differences are small, using sex as a proxy would just be <em>dumb</em>, not <em>unjust</em>.</p>
<p>But then it's <em>bizarre</em> that Keltham persists in his no-legal-sex-discrimination stance when his interlocutor brings up <em>military conscription</em> as a potential counterexample. Because, well, as unpleasant as it is for modern folk to think about ... there <em>was</em> war in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Men's bodies are built for war. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/">Men's <em>emotions</em> are built for war.</a> <a href="https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/EvolutionofWar.pdf">(Males have more reproductive fitness to gain and less to lose by the prospect of risking death in a war where the victors gain mating opportunities.)</a> The sex difference in muscle mass is <a href="/papers/janssen_et_al-skeletal_muscle_mass_and_distribution.pdf"><em>2.6 standard deviations</em></a>. That means a woman as strong as the average man is at <em>the 99.5th percentile</em> for women. That means if you just select everyone whose strength is greater than one standard deviation <em>below</em> the male mean, you end up excluding <em>94.5%</em> of women.</p>
<p>Notwithstanding that Keltham grew up in a peaceful industrialized Society that <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1612939#reply-1612939">screened off its history</a> (such that he wouldn't have read histories of some analogue of Genghis Khan), it seems like Keltham should know this stuff? We're told that dath ilan <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140">has very advanced evolutionary psychology</a>, and there's no apparent reason for them to have spent any of their eugenics bandwidth selecting for reduced sexual dimorphism. (Although given the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender">Purely Aesthetic Gender</a> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/2abhlr/its_normal_for_race_to_play_a_roll_in_ones/">in <em>Pathfinder</em></a>, it seems reasonable to posit reduced sexual dimorphism in Golarion?) If dath ilan doesn't have enough (non-counterfactual) violence to make strength differences salient, do they have <em>sports</em>? (In the peaceful industrialized Society where <em>I</em> grew up, it was salient my mediocre cross-country times were often better than the <em>best</em> girls' times.) We're told that <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1783037#reply-1783037">ordinary dath ilani are good at reasoning about effect sizes</a>.</p>
<p>But if Keltham <em>does</em> know this stuff, why is he talking like a UC Berkeley graduate? <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422">"Strength is an <em>externally visible and measurable</em> quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises,"</a> he says. When his interlocutor objects that strong women would get drafted, which would be terrible, Keltham asks how it would be <em>more</em> terrible than men getting drafted. When the interlocutor replies that the woman's marriage prospects would be damaged by a history living in close quarters with men in the army, Keltham muses that it sounds like she's implying that <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817432#reply-1817432">"the army would need strong enough internal governance to prevent women in it from being raped, but you could do that with cheaper truthspells?"</a></p>
<p>There's just <em>so much</em> wrong with this exchange from the perspective of anyone who knows anything about humans and isn't playing dumb for a religious American audience.</p>
<p>Firstly, if you decided that strength is the quality that determines who you want in your army, you should notice that you're going to be drafting almost all men <em>anyway</em>. (Again, a sex difference of <em>2.6 standard deviations</em> and a selection threshold 1 standard deviation below the male mean gives you a male:female ratio of (1 − Φ(−1))/(1 − Φ(1.6)) ≈ 15.4:1, where Φ is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_function">cumulative distribution function</a> of the normal distribution.)</p>
<p>To this, the Berkeley graduate might reply, "So then the optimal army has 15 men for every woman; what's the problem with that? Surely you don't want to make your army <em>less strong</em> just to satisfy some weird æsthetic that all your soldiers should have the same kind of genitals?"</p>
<p>A minor counterreply would be that, if people's sex is public information but there are administrative costs associated with strength-testing everyone, you probably wouldn't <em>bother</em> testing the women, for the same reason that, if you were mining for spellsilver ore, and one mine had fifteen times as much ore as the other, you wouldn't even set up your tools at the poorer mine until you had completely exhausted the first.</p>
<p>But more fundamentally, even if you assume strength-testing is free, we haven't yet taken into account all <em>other</em> sex differences that are relevant to military performance. It's not just that any other individual traits (<em>e.g.</em>, aggression) that you select for will stack multiplicatively, resulting in even more extreme ratios. There are also group-level effects that aren't captured by measuring the traits of individual soldiers: the social dynamics of a squad of fifteen men and one woman are going to be different from those of a squad of sixteen men. Even if you've selected the woman for strength and every martial virtue to equal any man, do the <em>men</em> know that in their subconscious, or are they going to be biased to want to protect her or seek her favor in a way that they wouldn't in an all-male environment?</p>
<p>You could command them not to—but does that actually <em>work</em>? People don't have conscious access to or control of the way their brain takes demographic base rates into account. <a href="/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf">Nelson <em>et al.</em> 1990</a> gave people photographs of women and men and asked them to estimate the photo-subjects' heights. The estimates end up reflecting sex as well as actual-height—which is, again, the correct Bayesian behavior given uncertainty in sex-blind estimates. But furthermore, when the researchers prepared a special height-matched set of photos (where for every woman of a given height, there was a man of the same height in the photo set) <em>and</em> told the participants about the height-matching <em>and</em> offered cash rewards for accuracy, more than half of the base-rate adjustment <em>still</em> remained! People don't know how to turn it off!</p>
<p>And if they <em>could</em> turn it off, such that you could order your male soldiers not to treat a woman among them any differently than they would a man, and have the verbal instruction have exactly the desired effect on their brain's subconscious quantitative decisionmaking machinery—who is this even <em>helping</em>, exactly?</p>
<p>Keltham expresses doubt whether it's worse for a woman to be conscripted than a man, and when his interlocutor gestures at harms to a woman from living among men (not trusted family members, but men unselected from the general public), Keltham understands that she's talking about the possibility of intercourse, including rape (!), and he immediately generates "cheap truthspells" as a way to mitigate that problem while maintaining sex-integrated military units.</p>
<p>And, sure, I agree that truthspells would help, given the assumption that you need to have sex-integrated military units. But—why is that a desideratum, at all? We're told that dath ilan's beliefs about evolutionary psychology <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1591440#reply-1591440">include the idea that</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The untrained male has an instinct to seize and guard a woman's reproductive capacity, instinctively using violence to stop her from interacting with other men at the same that he instinctively displays other forms of commitment to try to earn her acquiescence. The untrained female has adaptations that assume an environment in which men will try to pressure her into more sex than is optimal for her own reproductive fitness, so her adaptations push her to instinctively resist that pressure while also instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And just—if you <em>actually believe that</em>, it seems like there's this very obvious policy of <em>not forcing females to fight in close quarters alongside the people with an instinct to seize and guard female reproductive capacity</em>?! (Come to think of it, the "instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her" part seems like it could cause other kinds of problems, too??) Even if you have cheap truthspells, there's this concept of <a href="https://intelligence.org/2017/11/25/security-mindset-ordinary-paranoia/">'securitymindset'</a>, where you want to design systems that are robust against unexpected things happening, and the "Just don't conscript women in the first place" policy neatly sidesteps entire classes of potential social pathologies that you don't want to have to deal with at all in the organization you're using to keep your country from getting conquered?! If someone asks whether it's worse for a woman or a man to be put in the situation of having to fight in close quarters alongside people with <em>an instinct to seize and guard female reproductive capacity</em>, I don't think it should be hard to admit the obvious correct answer that that's worse for a woman?!</p>
<p>I mean, it's not worse <em>with <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities">Probability One</a></em>. Like any dath ilani or religiously devout American, I cherish diversity and exceptions, and want to treat people who are unusual for their demographic with the same care and respect as anyone else! (More, actually.) It's just—it seems like it should be possible to do that <em>without</em> trashing our ability to have conventions that perform well in the average case?? To the extent that there <em>is</em> a minority of women who want nothing more than to die gloriously in battle in service to their country, then, sure, you'd want and expect the country to be able to make use of that—and whether you want to induct them into the regular army, or have a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Army_Corps">special women's corps</a> is a complicated policy question that you'd want to make after appropriately weighing all of the trade-offs (like the unit-cohesion objection <em>vs.</em> less skill transfer due to not having cross-sex mentorships).</p>
<p>It's just—wasn't dath ilan's <em>whole thing</em> supposed to be about coordinating to find the optimal multi-agent policy using evidence and quantitative reasoning?! And suddenly Keltham is casually proposing <a href="https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1817422#reply-1817422">"stopp[ing] being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that"</a> without noticing that this is <em>excluding huge swathes of policyspace</em> (such as "conscript males, but accept female volunteers") for ideological reasons!? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!!</p>
<p>Maybe there's just no way to explain this in a way that makes sense to American ears? I <em>still</em> feel guilty writing this stuff. It's just—<a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">I was trained, long ago back in the 'aughts</a>, in a certain Art, and I'm <em>pretty sure</em> we were taught that being able to measure things and make different decisions based on the measurements was a good thing <em>in full generality</em>, without there being any special exception that specific cluster-membership measurements are actually bad?!</p>
<p><em>(Thanks for Ilzo for feedback.)</em></p>Gaydar Jamming2022-05-21T18:12:00-07:002022-05-21T18:12:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-05-21:/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/<p>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, <a href="/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/">as if the memory is encoded as the category rather than the precepts</a>. You know …</p><p>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, <a href="/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/">as if the memory is encoded as the category rather than the precepts</a>. You know it when you see it.)</p>
<p>One day in class, the topic of gender and handwriting came up, and it was remarked that L. also "wrote like a girl." Being the <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism">proud antisexist ideologue that I was at the time</a>, I <a href="/images/crossdreaming_notebook_samples.png">wrote in my notebook</a> about how this observation about L.'s handwriting was disturbing, in a way.</p>
<p>Naïvely, of course, you'd think it would be ideologically <em>validating</em>: L. and his manner and his handwriting were living proof that not all boys are masculine! But everyone knew <em>that</em>—even the smart sexists. No, the disturbing part was that if "feminine" handwriting—potentially—indicated "feminine" behavior more generally, that implied that <em>"femininity" was a valid concept</em>, which was itself not a notion I was inclined to grant. (Because why should a person's reproductive anatomy imply <em>anything</em> else about their <em>mind</em>, even if the occasional exception is admitted to? The whole idea is sexist.)</p>
<p>Ideology isn't my style anymore—or rather, these days, my ideology is about the accuracy of my probabilistic predictions, rather than denying the possibility or morality of making probabilistic predictions about humans. Looking back, I will not only unhesitatingly bite the bullet on femininity being a real thing, I'm also tempted to make a bold and seemingly "unrelated" prediction: L. was gay.</p>
<p>I mean, I don't <em>know</em> that; I have no recollection of the kid ever <em>saying</em> so in my presence. Nevertheless, as a probabilistic prediction, it seems like a good guess. I'm no longer afraid of stereotypes to the quantitative extent that I expect the stereotype to actually get the right answer, in contrast to my teenage ideological fever dream of not wanting that to be possible.</p>
<p>Something I still can't reconstruct from memory—or maybe <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie">lack the exact concepts to express</a>—is to what extent I "sincerely" thought that stereotyping didn't <em>work</em>, and to what extent I was self-righteously "playing dumb". Though my notebooks bear no record of it, I surely must have known <em>about</em> the stereotype—that <em>bad people</em> (not me) would assume that L. was gay. What did I think the bad people were <em>doing</em>, that would have them make that <em>particular</em> assumption out of the space of possible assumptions? (But without a concept of Bayesian reasoning as normative ideal, it never would have occured to me to ask myself that particular question, out of the space of possible questions.)</p>
<p>Maybe another anecdote from a few years later is also relevant. In the early 'tens, while <a href="/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/#back-to-school">slumming in community college</a>, I took the "Calculus III" course from one Prof. H., a really great teacher who respected my intellectual autonomy—and, as it happens, the man had a very distinctive voice. I'm not even sure how to describe it in terms of lower-level precepts, but you know it when you hear it. And I wondered, on the basis of his voice, whether <em>he</em> was gay.</p>
<p>At this point in my ideological evolution, I <em>did</em> have a concept of Bayesian reasoning as normative ideal. But I thought to myself, well, base rates: <em>most</em> people aren't gay, and the professor's voice isn't <em>enough</em> evidence to overcome that prior; he's probably not gay.</p>
<p>Looking back, I'm suspicious that I was reaching for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy">base rate neglect</a> as an excuse as an excuse for my old egalitarian assumption that stereotypes are invalid—notwithstanding the fact that base rate neglect is, in fact, a thing.</p>
<p>Although when I try to put numbers on it now, it's actually looking like I happened to get this one right: if 3% of men are gay, you need log<sub>2</sub>(97/3) ≈ 5 <a href="/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/">bits of evidence</a> to think that someone probably is. Is a sufficiently distinctive "gay voice" that much evidence—something you're 32 times more likely to hear from a gay man than a straight man?</p>
<p>It looks like you have to go awfully far into the tail to get that sufficiently distinctive. Table 2 in Smyth <em>et al.</em>'s <a href="/papers/smyth_et_al-male_voices_and_perceived_sexual_orientation.pdf">"Male Voices and Perceived Sexual Orientation"</a> works out to <a href="/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> ≈ 1.09. Assuming normality and equal variances for that effect size, you need to be 3.43 standard deviations out from the straight male mean in order to get that much evidence. (Because Φ(1.09 − 3.43)/Φ(−3.43) ≈ 32, where Φ is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_function">cumulative distribution function</a> of the normal distribution.)</p>
<p>I don't think Prof. H.'s voice was quite that extreme? Maybe it was only 2 or 2.5 standard deviations out, for a likelihood ratio of around 8–12.7, which is about 3–3.7 bits of evidence—which is an update from 3% to about 20–28%?</p>
<p>And the effect size of childhood sex-typed behavior on sexual orientation <a href="/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf">is around <em>d</em> ≈ 1.3</a>, so I'll actually go with roughly similar numbers for L.</p>
<p>I could easily be wrong about the specific numbers. (My gut expects a <em>skilled</em> "gaydar operator" to be more reliable than <em>d</em> ≈ 1.1, which could still be true if the published statistics are <a href="/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/">deflated by the measurement error</a> of less perceptive raters?) But I'm confident that this is the correct <em>methodology</em>. (Assuming that predictions don't causally <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05060">or otherwise</a> affect the things being predicted—but how likely is <em>that?</em>) My old anxieties about committing heresy have dissolved in the knowledge that it is, really, just a math problem.</p>Link: "Nonbinary Runners Have Been Here the Whole Time"2022-05-06T18:25:00-07:002022-05-06T18:25:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-05-06:/2022/May/link-nonbinary-runners-have-been-here-the-whole-time/<p><em>The New York Times</em> reports on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/sports/nonbinary-runners-races.html">nonbinary divisions in competitive footraces</a>. (<a href="https://archive.ph/3dkMt">Archived</a>; hat tip <a href="https://www.unz.com/isteve/run-of-the-mill-also-ran-finally-wins-a-running-race-just-by-calling-himself-nonbinary/">Steve Sailer</a>.)</p>
<p>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 <em>point</em> of sex-segregation in sports is (as opposed to …</p><p><em>The New York Times</em> reports on <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/sports/nonbinary-runners-races.html">nonbinary divisions in competitive footraces</a>. (<a href="https://archive.ph/3dkMt">Archived</a>; hat tip <a href="https://www.unz.com/isteve/run-of-the-mill-also-ran-finally-wins-a-running-race-just-by-calling-himself-nonbinary/">Steve Sailer</a>.)</p>
<p>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 <em>point</em> of sex-segregation in sports is (as opposed to just having everyone in the same category): if they admit that it's a pragmatic policy to give women a domain to compete in despite the sport-relevant trait distributions of females and males being different, then that at least opens up the <em>empirical</em> debate on whether hormone replacement therapy gets "close enough" for trans women to relevantly count as women.</p>
<p>But with the nonbinary category, there <em>is no</em> empirical issue to get confused with! It's <em>pure</em> identity narcissism—or, in more detail, it's a <em>pure</em> instance of the way in which sex-related <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy">high-dimensional</a> trait clusters get <a href="/2019/Dec/more-schelling/">reified</a> into <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">social categories</a>, resulting in some people learning a desire to escape their reified social category even in situations where sex actually is the decision-relevant trait, resulting in other people who are frustrated by being socially punished for pointing out that sex is sometimes a decision-relevant trait disparagingly accusing those people of "identity narcissism".</p>Backlog Metablogging, April 20222022-04-25T05:00:00-07:002022-04-25T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-04-25:/2022/Apr/backlog-metablogging-april-2022/<p>I feel like I've been pretty lazy for the last—ten months? A laziness born out of resignation and despair, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/#__sec3title">a sense that I've outlived myself</a>, that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy">the time we have left</a>. I may …</p><p>I feel like I've been pretty lazy for the last—ten months? A laziness born out of resignation and despair, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/#__sec3title">a sense that I've outlived myself</a>, that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy">the time we have left</a>. I may have picked up a slight gaming habit (to the tune of 275 hours of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slay_the_Spire"><em>Slay the Spire</em></a> and 660 games of <a href="https://teamwoodgames.com/"><em>Super Auto Pets</em></a>).</p>
<p>But it's not, <em>over</em>. While the world is still here, I still have things to fight for besides my reasonable comfort—and still <a href="/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/">(somehow yet still)</a> so much more yet unwritten! If my grandchildren won't read it (because I'm not even on a trajectory to have children, or because the world isn't on a trajectory to last that long), <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556">the next-next generation of language models will</a>.</p>
<p>In December 2018, I <a href="/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/">put up a teaser list of post ideas I hadn't then gotten around to writing up yet</a>. To remind myself—and you—that I'm still alive, maybe it's a good time to review how that went so far, and post a new list.</p>
<p>Ideas from the December 2018 list that got published/finished in some form—</p>
<ul>
<li>the last part of my planned reply to <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">Ozy's reply</a> to <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">my reply</a> to <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">Scott Alexander</a> got finished in December 2019 as <a href="/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/">"Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender"</a></li>
<li>the overlap-along-one-dimension-does-not-imply-overlap-in-the-entire-configuration-space thing got briefly <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy">covered on <em>Less Wrong</em> as "The Univariate Fallacy"</a> in June 2019</li>
<li>the point about how <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean">regression to the mean</a> unfortunately undermines the standard "But group differences to apply to individuals" moral got <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#everyday-base-rates">covered as part of the coda to my April 2020 review of the new Charles Murray book</a></li>
<li>the thing about minimalist "activism" focused on giving people more accurate information rather than lobbying for particular object-level decisions got mostly covered in September 2021's <a href="/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/">"I Don't Do Policy"</a></li>
<li>what my autogynephilic fantasy life looks like in detail got covered in May 2021's <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Ideas remaining from the December 2018 list that I still care about—</p>
<ul>
<li>"'But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means': Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology"<ul>
<li>If (<em>e.g.</em>) the 5% most masculine/androgynous females identify as NB to escape the strictures of the "woman" gender role, that increases the gender-role pressure on females who don't identify as NB (who are now presumed to consent to it)</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>something of my own take on what's going on with the etiology of MtF (more than just punting to <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/">Brown</a> or <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html">Lawrence</a> as my standard reference for the background worldview that my content takes for granted)<ul>
<li>I especially owe this to friend of the blog <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/">Tailcalled</a> who has become disillustioned with orthodox "Blanchardianism", and having been trapped in a ten-month laziness spiral of resignation and despair that my story and my world are over isn't an excuse while the world is, in fact, still here</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>the epistemic-horror short stories!!</li>
</ul>
<p>Ideas from the December 2018 list that I'm <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/">less excited about now and am less likely to finish</a>—</p>
<ul>
<li>naïve Bayes models for sex categorization</li>
<li>Codes of Conduct as an ideological enforcement mechanism</li>
<li>"The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition"</li>
<li><a href="https://faceapp.com/">FaceApp</a>/<a href="https://www.oculus.com/go/">Oculus Go</a> product reviews</li>
</ul>
<p>Book reviews I'm relatively unlikely to get around to finishing—</p>
<ul>
<li>joint book review of Kathleen Stock's <em>Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism</em> and Kathryn Paige Harden's <em>The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality</em><ul>
<li>the subtitle parallelism is charming, and the heroic willingness to face facts that are inconvenient to one's value-commitments while staying true to those values is <em>on theme</em> for this blog</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Imogen Binnie's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_(Binnie_novel)"><em>Nevada</em></a><ul>
<li>something about the horror of a world without ambition or the life of the mind (or specifically, the philosopher–scientist's mind, rather than the activist's)? Binnie (who will always have more readers than me) writes characters don't have any concept of <em>doing</em> anything except drugs and complaining about Society's transphobia.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Abigail Shrier's <em>Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters</em><ul>
<li><em>Damage</em> is sensationalist right-wing journalism, rather than the kind of careful, nuanced scholarship of the kind you would expect to be reviewed by such a refined blog as <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>—but damned if the situation on the ground doesn't call more sensationalist right-wing journalism</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Shon Faye's <em>The Transgender Issue</em></li>
<li>Multi-Book Review: Various Sex-Ed Books for Children<ul>
<li>comparing and contrasting mainstream (for now) selections (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Big-Secret-Talking-about/dp/0316101834"><em>What's the Big Secret? Talk about Sex with Girls and Boys</em></a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Amazing-You-Getting-Smart-Private/dp/0142410586"><em>Amazing You! Getting Smart About Your Private Parts</em></a>, and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-Stork-Families-Friends/dp/0763633313"><em>It's Not the Stork! A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends</em></a>), to a genderist alternative (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-You-Gender-Identity/dp/1785927280"><em>Who Are You? The Kid's Guide to Gender Identity</em></a>) and a Christian alternative (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Full-Set-Design-Revised-Paperback/dp/B00O5DIVTU">the <em>God's Design for Sex</em> series</a>)</li>
<li>The ideological books are what you would expect and impossible to parody, but I would be <a href="/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/">more comfortable reading the Christian book</a> to a child, because at least it explains the facts ("I have a penis. That makes me a boy like Daddy") in the course of attributing everything to God, whereas <em>Who Are You?</em> is trying to set up <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">a world where facts aren't a thing</a> ("Babies can't talk, so grown-ups make a guess by looking at their bodies").<ul>
<li>the Christians also believe in beauty and have much more competent illustrations</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>You can also see a propaganda gradient in the mainstream books over time. <em>What's the Big Secret?</em> (1997) acknowledges sex stereotypes as having a grain of truth, but is firm about them not being normative or definitive ("Girls and boys do play in different ways. Sometimes, but not always"), whereas <em>It's Not the Stork</em> (2006) bizarrely tries to rebut psychological-sex-difference claims without even acknowledging what the claims are ("Girls catch fish and worms and bugs!" "So do boys!") and has more racially diverse illustrations.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>New list of more ideas I want to finish—</p>
<ul>
<li>the Whole Dumb Story of my breakup with the so-called "rationalist" community (working title: "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning")<ul>
<li>This has been brewing for a couple years. (<a href="/2020/Aug/memento-mori/">"I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life,"</a> I said in August 2020.) I have thousands of words of drafting and notes. (<a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">"Sexual Dimorphism"</a> was actually Part One of this, published separately as a mere megapost when I found I didn't have the stamina to tell the Whole Dumb Story in a single mega-megapost.) It's just been hard, but—it's over, isn't it? Why can't I move on?</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>book review of <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/inconvenient-truths/">the <em>new</em> new Charles Murray book</a> that's <em>actually</em> about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about<ul>
<li>with a coda about how the thing itself is much less important than how <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts">the political necessity of denying the thing</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies">ends up</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology">recursively</a> <em>destroying our Society's ability to reason</em> ...<ul>
<li>with potentially <em>astronomical</em> consequences, as a Society that managed to successfully do eugenic selection for intelligence <a href="https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/"><em>before</em></a> developing computing would have a much better shot at solving <a href="https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/mzgtmmTKKn5MuCzFJ">the artificial intelligence alignment problem</a> ...<ul>
<li>in contrast to how in <em>our</em> Society, people can't even <em>talk</em> about this stuff except under cover of a pseudonym! We are dead! We are so dead!!</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>speculative but deeply-researched post arguing that some young children who are identified as transgender in the current ideological environment, would likely not have had gender problems at all in a different environment (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data")</li>
<li>I owe Tracing Woodgrains a linkpost-with-commentary to his <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/si7k2c/on_transitions_freedom_of_form_and_the_righteous/">nice essay about me</a></li>
<li>speculations about my <a href="https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639">"medianworld"</a> (a worldbuilding exercise from the <a href="https://www.glowfic.com/">Glowfic</a> community, where you try to portray a realistic, consilient world in which the average person is like you)</li>
<li>a reply to Scott Alexander's <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/">"Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"</a><ul>
<li>I have a few thousand words drafted, but I haven't been happy with it, because it's surprisingly hard to explain my point of view in a way that I think will land for people who don't already share my parsimony intuitions; here as with <a href="/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf">Moser 2009</a>, I'm not doubting the survey data itself; rather, I think we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that in this case a Yes answer to the same survey question doesn't mean the same thing for both populations</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>actually, I want to explore the point about regression to the mean and group differences in <em>more mathematical detail</em>, because there's more philosophical depth here: regression is an empirically observable phenomenon, but there's <em>also</em> a sense in which the choice of group is meaningfully subjective: do I regress the mean of my immediate family, or my extended family, or my race? </li>
<li>a post about how redefining gender categories is the right thing to do insofar as many people transitioning changes statistical structure of data in the world (following Stuart Armstrong's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WikzbCsFjpLTRQmXn/declustering-reclustering-and-filling-in-thingspace">"Declustering, Reclustering, and Filling in Thingspace"</a>)<ul>
<li>This is probably important to write up as a novel argument "supporting" the "pro-trans" coalition, in contrast to how more of my content tends to code as "anti-trans" when you orthogonally project into the one-dimensional space of the usual battle lines. The fact that I generate and publish <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">such</a> <a href="/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/">arguments</a> spontaneously is how you know—and how I know—that I'm not a <em>partisan hack</em>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>a post about how sex concepts represent <em>both</em> categorical differences <em>and</em> the conjunction of statistical differences of various effect sizes, such that if you try to unpin the word from the categorical differences, you end up (as per the usual gender-critical complaint) defining gender in terms of stereotypes because there's nothing <em>left</em> for the word to attach to (working title: "Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes")</li>
<li>a post about how gender identity ideology is actually <em>not</em> very compatible with the traditional liberal impulse to make gender less of a big deal, because there's a huge difference between omitting category information that's not relevant, <em>vs.</em> letting people choose their category-membership (working title: "Elision <em>vs</em>. Choice")</li>
<li>a steelperson of the "assigned at birth" terminology (working title: "'Assigned at Birth' Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)")</li>
<li>I occasionally get people telling me that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter">it doesn't matter</a> whether AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, <em>without</em> actually understanding the nature of the condition (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")</li>
<li>a post about the motivation for positing peseudobisexuality or meta-attraction as part of the two-type taxonomy of MtF: it may <em>sound</em> like a suspicious <em>ad hoc</em> patch to save the theory from falsification by bi trans women, but it's actually needed to explain the commonality of (a) AGP males expressing attraction to men <em>only while in "girl mode" themselves</em>, and (b) self-reports of sexual orientation changing post-transition in trans women who weren't androphilic <em>before</em><ul>
<li>(a) is suspicious is because "bi + AGP, independently" doesn't explain why the interest would be dependent on one's <em>own</em> presentation; (b) is suspicious is because everything else we know about sexual orientation in males (but <a href="/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf">not females</a>) makes it look awfully <em>stable</em>. (Conversion therapy doesn't work; criminally convicted pedophiles still show genital response to child stimuli despite the huge incentives to conceal/repress it; <a href="/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf">correlation of homosexuality with childhood behavior</a> makes it look like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational-Activational_Hypothesis">prenatal organizational effect, rather than an activational effect</a> that would respond to HRT as an adult.)</li>
<li>Maybe these two bullet points suffice and I don't need to pad it out into a whole post? </li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>a critique of the implicit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)">presentism</a> in Holden Karnofsky's <a href="https://www.cold-takes.com/"><em>Cold Takes</em></a> blog<ul>
<li>For a blog that <a href="https://www.cold-takes.com/olden-the-imaginary-billion-year-old-version-of-me/">aspires to see the world as if you were a billion years old</a>, there's just something very <em>off</em> about proclaiming with a straight face that <a href="https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/">"one of our goals as a society should be to fight things—from sexism to disease—that have afflicted us for most of our history"</a>. Not that I'm pro-sexism—I grew up in the current year, too—but I think a little bit of self-awareness is in order about how our ancestors had a word for "disease" in their own language and knew why it was bad, whereas our concept of "sexism" is <a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sexism">about sixty years old</a>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>Autogynephilia Should Be Recognized Openly2022-04-24T23:04:00-07:002022-04-24T23:04:00-07:00GPT-3tag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-04-24:/2022/Apr/autogynephilia-should-be-recognized-openly/<p><em>(A brief guest post by friend of the blog <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3">GPT-3</a> (text-davinci-002, <a href="https://beta.openai.com/docs/api-reference/edits/create#edits/create-temperature">temperature</a> 0.7, <a href="https://beta.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/create#completions/create-best_of">best of</a> 3).)</em></p>
<p>Autogynephilia, or the sexual attraction to oneself as a woman, is a controversial topic within the LGBTQ+ community. Some believe that autogynephilia is a form of mental illness, while others see it as …</p><p><em>(A brief guest post by friend of the blog <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3">GPT-3</a> (text-davinci-002, <a href="https://beta.openai.com/docs/api-reference/edits/create#edits/create-temperature">temperature</a> 0.7, <a href="https://beta.openai.com/docs/api-reference/completions/create#completions/create-best_of">best of</a> 3).)</em></p>
<p>Autogynephilia, or the sexual attraction to oneself as a woman, is a controversial topic within the LGBTQ+ community. Some believe that autogynephilia is a form of mental illness, while others see it as a valid sexual orientation. I believe that autogynephilia should be recognized openly, and that autogynephilic men can lead fulfilling lives as men without necessarily transitioning to live as trans women.</p>
<p>Autogynephilia is not a new phenomenon. It has been documented throughout history, and there are many famous examples of autogynephilic men, including author Virginia Woolf and politician Hillary Clinton. Autogynephilia is not a mental illness, and it does not necessarily mean that a person is transgender. Many autogynephilic men are perfectly happy living as men, and do not feel the need to transition to live as a woman.</p>
<p>There are many reasons why autogynephilia should be recognized openly. First and foremost, it is a valid sexual orientation. Just like any other orientation, it should not be hidden or ashamed of. Additionally, autogynephilia is not a choice. It is not something that a person can simply "turn off." Therefore, autogynephilic men should not be forced to suppress their sexuality in order to conform to societal norms.</p>
<p>Furthermore, autogynephilic men can lead fulfilling lives as men. Many autogynephilic men are successful in their careers, and have healthy and happy relationships. They do not need to transition to live as a woman in order to be happy and fulfilled.</p>
<p>In conclusion, autogynephilia should be recognized openly, and autogynephilic men can lead fulfilling lives as men without necessarily transitioning to live as trans women.</p>Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War2022-04-16T18:45:00-07:002022-04-16T18:45:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-04-16:/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/<p>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 <em>didn't</em> have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">ideological war</a> of survival against a Society that's <em>trying to kill me</em>.</p>
<p>(Technically …</p><p>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 <em>didn't</em> have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">ideological war</a> of survival against a Society that's <em>trying to kill me</em>.</p>
<p>(Technically, trying to impose the use of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">gerrymandered</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">concepts</a> that raise the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">message length</a> of my existence in social reality, which is the same thing as lowering the probability that social reality assigns to my existence. Like I said, <em>trying to kill me</em>.)</p>
<p>Peacetime was <em>amazing</em>. I was so happy—not ecstatic, but happy in the ordinary way of moral patient, someone whose life is valuable simply in the experience of living of it, rather than for its effects on some grand Cause. I <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/minimax-search-and-the-structure-of-cognition/">wrote a <em>chess engine</em></a>; I <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/">gave money to <em>charity</em></a>; I <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/">drank <em>pumpkin spice</em></a> and played that tower defense game where the bad ponies are the good ponies and the good ponies are the bad ponies.</p>
<p>That carefree selfishness is gone now, subordinated to the war effort. And so soon after the last war, too.</p>
<p>The first shots of the last war came on 29 November 2007. I was a schoolstudent at the University in Santa Cruz. Coming into that quarter, I had been excited to take the famous "Introduction to Feminisms" course, only to find, as the quarter wore on, that it seemed to be taught in a dialect of English that I could not speak. The texts and the professor kept describing features of Society as <em>oppression</em> as if simply to condemn them. I agreed with the condemnation, of course, but I could not understand it as <em>knowledge</em> and could not produce such sentences in my own voice; I wanted an explanation of how the oppression <em>worked</em>.</p>
<p>My subsequent difficulty in writing the required papers for that course weighed heavily on my soul. The failure to live up to expectations would have been shameful for any course, but as a <em>male</em> squandering the privilege of being allowed to take "Introduction to Feminisms", it was simply unbearable. Unable to reach the prescribed wordcount for the final paper, I had a hysterical nervous breakdown at the end of the quarter, crying and screaming for hours, "I betrayed them; I betrayed them." (The professor and the T.A., who were kind and deserved better than to have to teach a male who <em>couldn't write</em>.)</p>
<p>Ironically, in the inferno of shame over having betrayed my mandate to the University, my attitude towards school flipped practically overnight. I had never been the most <em>diligent</em> student, but I had mostly accepted the duty of getting an "education": I didn't always do my homework, but when I didn't, I at least felt guilty about it. But suddenly, the difference between schooling-as-education and actual <em>learning</em> became distinct. I had <em>always</em> been a voracious reader; for years, I had been filling little pocket notebooks with my own thoughts—clearly, school itself couldn't take credit for everything I knew. I took a leave of absence from the University and went back to my (previously, "summer") job at the supermarket, with the intention of being an explicit autodidact. I had always learned from books "in passing", in my "free time", but now I would give it the full force of my <em>legitimate</em> effort—it wasn't "leisure" anymore; it was my <em>actual</em> work.</p>
<p>And not just reading, either. I remembered enjoying the linear algebra class I took in winter quarter freshman year at the University, although the course had gone slowly, such that a year and a half after it was over, I found I didn't recall what an eigenvalue was, although I had retained mastery of taking the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_echelon_form#Reduced_row_echelon_form">reduced row echelon form</a> of a matrix. But what did it matter that the "course" was "over", if I didn't <em>know</em>? So I got out the textbook <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144938.Linear_Algebra_with_Applications">(Bretcher, 3rd edition)</a> and <a href="/images/math_page_1.jpg">set to work</a> ...</p>
<p>This was fine, for a while. I learned from my books, and—there was a <em>dignity</em> to working at the supermarket. It was boring, to be sure, but at least I had some function other than simply to obey a designated authority. You can <em>tell</em> when a customer's latte is too foamy, or the coinmag on checkstand 1 needs to be swapped out, on its own terms, and not because the teacher said so.</p>
<p>But making $9.40 an hour at the supermarket indefinitely (and paying a nominal rent to live with my mom) didn't seem like an acceptable destiny for someone of my social class. It was assumed that at some point, I would have to figure out how to get a grown-up job (although my colleagues who had been at the supermarket for 20 years probably wouldn't approve of me calling it that).</p>
<p>Somehow, this seemed more of a daunting problem than learning linear algebra. To make a dumb story short (I tried <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College">career college</a> briefly on the theory that they could <em>just</em> teach me job-stuff without them fraudulently claiming credit for my education, then found that horrible and traumatizing for the same reasons as regular school and quit, then thought I could study for the same <a href="https://www.comptia.org/certifications/which-certification">certifications</a> on my own, then took a differential equations class at community college just for fun and to prove that my math self-study measured up to standards—and did poorly, leaving me devastated and feeling obligated to finish my degree after all in order to prove that I could), I eventually ended up back in college again, at community college, and then San Francisco State, my father not willing to pay for me to go back to the University in Santa Cruz again.</p>
<p><a id="back-to-school"></a>Now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was <em>awful</em>. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the <em>subject matter</em>. I wanted it to be <em>normal</em> for boasts of achievement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained <em>deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality</em>", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."</p>
<p>(Where, sure, it makes sense to take a test occasionally in order to verify that one isn't self-deceiving about the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality, or in order to provide some amount of third-party-legible <em>evidence about</em> the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality—but the test score itself isn't the <em>point</em>.)</p>
<p>I hated the fact that, if it weren't for my desperate efforts to start intellectual conversations with anyone and everyone, people would assume I was one of <em>them</em>. Being perceived that way by Society <em>hurt</em>. I was frequently moved to rage or tears just getting through the day in that dehumanizing environment. (The supermarket didn't feel like slumming; community college absolutely did.)</p>
<p>That part of my life is behind me now—not because I won my ideological war against institutionalized schooling, but because I <em>escaped</em> to a different world where that war is no longer relevant. My autodidactic romance had already included some amount of computer programming, and taking a <a href="https://www.appacademy.io/">9-week web development bootcamp</a> leveled up my skills and self-confidence far enough for me to easily find a well-paying software development job. (As with the supermarket, the code bootcamp didn't feel dysfunctional and oppressive in the way that school did, precisely <em>because</em> no one cares if you graduated from code bootcamp; it was very clear that the focus was on acquiring skill at the craft, rather than obeying the dictates of an Authority.) So I went on to live happily—if not ever after, then at least for a brief, beautiful moment from 2014 to mid-2016.</p>
<hr>
<p>But that was just my good fortune. There are others who weren't so lucky, who are still suffering in mind-slavery under Authority in the world of schools I left behind ...</p>
<p>We could imagine someone sympathetic to my plight in school deciding that my problem was a psychological condition called "student dysphoria"—discomfort with one's assigned social role of student. We could imagine a whole political movement to help sufferers of student dysphoria by <em>renaming</em> everything: instead of a "student", I could be a "research associate", instead of taking "classes", I could attend "research seminars"—all while the <em>substance</em> of my daily working conditions and social expectations remained the same.</p>
<p>I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of <em>the word</em> "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my <em>actual</em> problem. It would probably make things <em>worse</em> by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to <em>articulate</em> what my problem was. My pain and suffering was no less <em>real</em> for being <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">"merely" game-theoretic (looking to the reactions of others)</a>, rather than some intrinsic organic condition to be accommodated.</p>
<p>Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being <em>the whole thing</em>. I'm happy to learn from the masters: that's what textbooks <em>are</em>. I wasn't <em>delusional</em> about doing particularly novel original research; I just wanted recognition for the real intellectual work I <em>was</em> doing under my own power.</p>
<p>Asking whether student dysphoria is a real or fake condition would be the wrong question. The pain of not being seen by Society the way you want to be seen is unquestionably real—but <em>because</em> it's real, it can only be addressed by addressing its real causes: the mismatches between how I see my self, how Society sees me, and what I actually am. If I think Society has me all wrong, I might engage in a desperate and obviously hopeless ideological war to prove it—but to <em>actually</em> prove it, not to coerce Society into humoring me. If Society isn't buying my vision, that terrible reality is something I need to track.</p>Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal2022-03-13T13:35:00-07:002022-03-13T13:35:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-03-13:/2022/Mar/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal/<blockquote>
<p>Go, Soul, the body's guest,<br>
Upon a thankless errand:<br>
Fear not to touch the best;<br>
The truth shall be thy warrant:<br>
Go, since I needs must die,<br>
And give the world the lie.</p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie">"The Lie" by Walter Raleigh</a></p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="summary">Summary</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p>In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's …</p></li></ul><blockquote>
<p>Go, Soul, the body's guest,<br>
Upon a thankless errand:<br>
Fear not to touch the best;<br>
The truth shall be thy warrant:<br>
Go, since I needs must die,<br>
And give the world the lie.</p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie">"The Lie" by Walter Raleigh</a></p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="summary">Summary</h3>
<ul>
<li>
<p>In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns: as a matter of language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw: you shouldn't be required to commit to a stance on what sex someone is in order to say a grammatical sentence about her or him.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>This seems fine as a critique of the existing English language. However, Yudkowsky then goes on to proclaim, in connection with pronouns for transgender people, that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just <em>is</em> the normative definition. Because it is <em>logically</em> rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition <em>into the very language protocol we are using to communicate</em>."</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>However, this allegedly "simplest and best" proposal fails to achieve its stated aim of avoiding baking controversial claims into the language grammar. <strong>The <em>reason</em> trans people want others to use their designated pronouns is <em>because</em> they're trying to control their socially-perceived sex category</strong> and English speakers interpret <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> as conveying sex-category information. Yudkowsky's proposed circular redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": <strong>if it were <em>actually true</em> that <em>he</em> simply referred to those who take the pronoun <em>he</em>, then there would be no reason for trans people to care which pronoun people used for them.</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>The "meaning" of language isn't some epiphenominal extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage.</strong> The word "dog" means what it does <em>because</em> English speakers use the word that way; if you wanted "dog" to mean something different, you'd need to change the way English speakers behave. Thus, <strong>circularly redefining <em>he</em> and <em>she</em> as purportedly referring to pronoun preferences rather than sex doesn't work, if people are still in practice choosing pronouns on the basis of perceived sex.</strong></p>
</li>
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<p><strong>Given that <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> do in fact convey sex category information to English speakers, some speakers might perceive an interest in refusing demands to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.</strong> This does <em>not</em> constitute a philosophical commitment that pronouns can be "lies" as such.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky seemingly denies that pronouns convey sex category information to English speakers, claiming, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." <strong>This self-report is not plausible, as evidenced by previous writings by Yudkowsky that treat sex and pronouns as synonymous.</strong></p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>I'm <em>not</em> claiming that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun usage policy.</strong> I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing. Rather, I'm claiming that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided"><strong>policy debates should not appear one-sided</strong></a>: in order to be politically neutral in your analysis of why someone might choose one pronoun usage policy over another, you need to <em>acknowledge</em> the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties. <strong>It can simultaneously be the case that pressuring speakers to use pronouns at odds with their perceptions of sex is a cost to those speakers, <em>and</em> that failing to exert such pressure is a cost to trans people.</strong> It's possible and desirable to be honest about that cost–benefit analysis, while ultimately choosing a policy that favors some parties' interests over others.</p>
</li>
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<p><strong>People with gender dysphoria who are considering whether to transition need <em>factually accurate information</em> about gender-transition interventions</strong>: if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefited you, or wrongly undergo an intervention that harms you. <strong>This includes facts about how pronouns work in the existing English language.</strong> If it were <em>actually true</em> that the simplest and best convention is that <em>he</em> refers to the set of people who have asked us to use <em>he</em>, then asking for new pronouns despite not physically passing as the corresponding sex wouldn't be costly. But in fact, it is costly. As someone with a history of gender problems, this is decision-relevant to me. Thus, Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes me by spreading disinformation about the costs of asking for new pronouns; <strong>I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth.</strong></p>
</li>
</ul>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228">In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns</a>. As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw. The function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more concise to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't <em>need</em> to take a stance on someone's sex in order to talk about <a href="/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/">her or</a> him putting a book on the shelf.</p>
<p>This affects, for example, science-fiction authors writing about AIs or hermaphroditic aliens (which don't have a sex), or mystery authors writing about a crime suspect whose identity (and therefore, sex) is unknown. In these cases, <em>she</em> or <em>he</em> are inappropriate, but the English language offers no alternative lacking its own downsides: <em>it</em> is understood to refer to non-persons, <em>they</em> gets conjugated as a plural, and neopronouns like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun"><em>ey/em/eir</em></a>—or <a href="http://www.urticator.net/essay/0/30.html"><em>ve/ver/vis</em></a>, as used in some of <a href="https://intelligence.org/files/CFAI.pdf">Yudkowsky's juvenilia</a>—are hard to rally adoption for because pronouns are a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed_classes">closed class</a>—not something people are used to new members of being coined, in the way that people are used to seeing unfamiliar nouns, adjectives, or verbs.</p>
<p>It doesn't have to be this way! If you were fortunate enough to be in the position of intelligently designing a language from scratch, you could just include a singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun (like <em>it</em>, but for persons, or like <em>they</em> but unambiguously singular) in the original closed set of pronouns! If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun"><em>ey</em></a> or singular <em>they</em> would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language while driving the collision rate even lower than that of the sex-based system—like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of <a href="https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27">spatial referencing in American Sign Language</a> (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).</p>
<p>(Although—one might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" could <em>be</em> part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. None of the other most salient features of a human can quite accomplish the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)">(clinal)</a> and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)</p>
<p>If you grew up speaking English, gendered pronouns feel "normal" while gendered <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class">noun classes</a> in many other languages (where, <em>e.g.</em>, in French, a dog, <em>le chien</em>, is "masculine", but a potato, <em>la pomme de terre</em>, is "feminine") seem strange and unnecessary, but someone who grew up with neither would regard both as strange. If you spoke a language that didn't <em>already</em> have gendered pronouns, you probably wouldn't be spontaneously eager to add them.</p>
<p>All this seems fine as a critique of the existing English pronoun system! However, I argue that Yudkowsky's prescription for English speakers going forward goes badly wrong. First, Yudkowsky argues that it's bad for stances on complicated empirical issues to be part of the language grammar itself: since people might disagree on who fits into the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">empirical clusters</a> of "female" and "male", you don't want speakers to be forced to make a call on that just in order to be able to use a pronoun.</p>
<p>Fair enough. Sounds like an argument for universal singular <em>they</em> (and eating the cost of increased collisions where it's ambiguous which subject an instance of <em>they</em> would refer to): if you don't think pronouns should convey sex-category information, then don't use pronouns that convey sex-category information! But then, in an unexplained leap, Yudkowsky proclaims:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So it seems to me that the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he', with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" and to say that this just <em>is</em> the normative definition. Because it is <em>logically</em> rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition <em>into the very language protocol we are using to communicate</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem with this is that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6fKszWY6gLZSX2Ey/fake-optimization-criteria">the alleged rationale for the proposal does not support the proposal</a>. If your default pronoun for those-who-haven't-asked goes by perceived sex (which one presumes is what Yudkowsky means by "gamete size"—we almost never <em>observe</em> people's gametes), then you're still baking sex-category information into the language protocol in the form of the default! Moreover, this is clearly an "intended" rather than an accidental effect of the proposal, in the sense that a policy that <em>actually</em> avoided baking sex-category information into the language (like universal singular <em>they</em>, or name-initial- or hair-color-based pronouns) would not have the same appeal to those who support self-chosen pronouns: <em>why</em> is it that some people would want to opt-out of the sex-based default?</p>
<p>Well, it would seem that the motivating example—the causal–historical explanation for why we're having this conversation about pronoun reform in the first place—is that trans men (female-to-male transsexuals) prefer to be called <em>he</em>, and trans women (male-to-female transsexuals) prefer to be called <em>she</em>. (Transsexuals seem much more common than people who just have principled opinions about pronoun reform without any accompanying desire to change what sex other people perceive them as.)</p>
<p>But the <em>reason</em> trans people want this is <em>because</em> they're trying to change their socially-perceived sex category ("gender") and actually-existing English speakers interpret <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> as conveying sex-category information. People who request <em>he/him</em> pronouns aren't doing it because they want their subject pronoun to be a two-letter word rather than a three-letter word, or because they hate the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative">voiceless postalveolar fricative</a> (<em>sh</em>) sound. They're doing it <em>because</em>, in English, those are the pronouns for <em>males</em>. If it were <em>actually true</em> that <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> were just two alternative third-person pronouns that could be used interchangeably with no difference in meaning, with the only function of the distinction being collision-avoidance, then <em>there would be no reason to care</em> which one someone used, as long as the referent was clear. But this doesn't match people's behavior: using gender pronouns other than those preferred by the subject is typically responded to as a social attack (as would be predicted by the theory that <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> convey sex-category information and transsexuals don't want to be perceived as their natal sex), not with, "Oh, it took me an extra second to parse your sentence because you unexpectedly used a pronoun different from the one the subject prefers as per convention, but now I understand what you meant" (as would be predicted by the theory that "<em>he</em> refers to the set of people who have asked us to use <em>he</em> [...] and to say that this just <em>is</em> the normative definition").</p>
<p>You can't have it both ways. "That toy is worthless", says one child to another, "<em>therefore</em>, you should give it to me." But if the toy were <em>actually</em> worthless, why is the first child demanding it? The problem here is not particularly subtle or hard to understand! If the second child were to appeal to an adult's authority, and the adult replied, "The toy <em>is</em> worthless, so give it to him," you would suspect the grown-up of not being impartial.</p>
<p>"Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information, as an apolitical matter of language design," is a fine <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/">motte</a>, but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "<em>Therefore</em>, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request." Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of the policy of keeping both <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> but asserting that the difference doesn't mean anything.</p>
<p><a id="t-v-distinction"></a>This may be clearer to some readers if we consider a distinction less emotionally and politically fraught than sex/gender in the current year. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction">Many languages have two different second person singular pronouns that distinguish the speaker's relationship to the listener as being more familiar/intimate, or more formal/hierarchical.</a> In Spanish, for example, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted">the familiar pronoun is <em>tú</em> and the formal pronoun is <em>usted</em></a>: one would address friends, family members, children, or personal servants as <em>tú</em>, but strangers or social superiors as <em>usted</em>. Using the wrong pronoun can be the cause of offense or awkwardness. A speaker switching from <em>usted</em> to <em>tú</em> for an interlocutor who they're getting along with might ask if it's okay with <em>¿Te puedo tutear?</em> (Can I call you <em>tú</em>?) or <em>Nos tuteamos, ¿verdad?</em> (We call each other <em>tú</em>, right?); this is somewhat analogous to an English speaker asking if they may address someone by first name, rather than with a courtesy title or honorific (Ms./Mr. Lastname, or ma'am/sir).</p>
<p>One could argue that the <em>tú</em>/<em>usted</em> distinction is bad language design for the same reason Yudkowsky opposes the <em>she</em>/<em>he</em> distinction: you shouldn't be forced to make a call on how familiar your relationship with someone is just in order to be able to use a pronoun for them. The modern English way is more flexible: you <em>can</em> indicate formality if you want to by saying additional words, but it's not baked into the grammar itself.</p>
<p>However, if you were going to reform Spanish (or some other language with the second-person formality distinction), you would probably abolish the distinction altogether, and just settle on one second-person singular pronoun. Indeed, that's what happened in English historically—the formal <em>you</em> took over as the universal second-person pronoun, and the informal singular <em>thou</em>/<em>thee</em>/<em>thine</em> has vanished from common usage. (People still recognize it as a second-person pronoun when encountered in old poetry—"The truth shall be thy warrant", <em>&c.</em>—but most probably aren't aware of the formality distinction.) You wouldn't keep both forms, but circularly redefine them as referring only to the referent's preferred choice of address (?!).</p>
<p>Similarly, when second-wave feminists objected to the convention of <em>Miss</em> or <em>Mrs.</em> forcing speakers to identify a woman's marital status, the response was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.#Historical_development_and_revival_of_the_term">to popularize the marriage-agnostic alternative <em>Ms.</em></a>, not to circularly redefine <em>Miss</em> and <em>Mrs.</em></p>
<p>Or consider how previous generations of public intellectuals considered this exact problem. In 1983, Douglas R. Hofstadter also expressed disapproval of <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> as a matter of language design, and to illustrate the point about how alien and unnecessary gendered language would seem if you weren't already used to it, wrote a satirical piece, <a href="https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html">"A Person Paper on Purity in Language"</a>, in the persona of a conservative author in a society with race-based (!) language conventions, including the pronouns whe/wis for whites and ble/bler for blacks. In neither the piece itself (during which Hofstadter's alter-ego brings up and rejects a couple of reform suggestions from the liberals of whis Society, including singular <em>they</em>), nor the Post-Scriptum in its subsequent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas">anthologization</a>, does Hofstadter entertain the idea of redefining <em>he</em> and <em>she</em> (or <em>whe</em> and <em>ble</em>) to refer to the subject's pronoun preference.</p>
<p>It's worth asking: why not? The statement of the objective language-design flaw (pronouns shouldn't denote sex, that's dumb; why would you define a language that way) was <em>the same</em> in 1983 as it is in 2022. If it's so clear to Yudkowsky in the current year that self-identification is just the "simplest and best protocol" to repair the objective flaw in English's design, why didn't that simplest and best solution occur to Hofstadter in 1983?</p>
<p>Could it, perhaps, be the case that public intellectuals in the current year might have some <em>other</em> motivation to conclude that "<em>he</em> refers to the set of people who have asked us to use <em>he</em>", that was not present for their analogues in 1983? But if so, they'd <em>tell</em> us that ... right?</p>
<p>Really, the circular definition shouldn't satisfy <em>anyone</em>: people who want someone to call them <em>usted</em> (or <em>tú</em>), do so <em>because</em> of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the <em>existing</em> (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading">"wireheading"</a>. You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you <em>usted</em>. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you <em>usted</em> seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of <em>usted</em> implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously <em>notices</em> the problem, the redefinition is <em>functionally</em> "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't <em>actually</em> using it internally.</p>
<p>Indeed, when I look at what contemporary trans activists write, I don't see them approving of this idea that pronoun choices <em>don't mean anything</em>. <a href="https://twitter.com/AFROlNCOGNlTO/status/13890805920844636180">In the words of one Twitter user</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>misgendering sucks, but what feels even more violent is when people get my pronouns right and i can tell they still perceive me as a man</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the <a href="https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079097805250224130">words of</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079142303183327232">another</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>a lot of cis people use 'learning someone's pronoun' as a copout from doing the important internal work of actually reconsidering their impression of the person's gender</p>
<p>like let's be real—the reason you have a hard time "remembering" her pronoun is because you don't really think of her as a her. if you practiced thinking of her as a her, her pronoun would just come. and then you wouldn't be privately betraying her in your head all the time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These authors are to be commended for making their view so clear and explicit: in order to not betray your trans friends (according to this view), you need to think of them as the gender that they say they are. Mere verbal pronoun compliance in the absence of underlying belief is insufficient and possibly treacherous.</p>
<p>This point that pronoun changes are desired precisely <em>because</em> of what they <em>do</em> imply about sex categories in the existing English language is a pretty basic one, that one would think should scarcely need to be explained. And yet Yudkowsky steadfastly ignores the role of existing meanings in this debate, bizarrely writing as if we were defining a conlang from scratch:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are and how appropriate it is to discretely cluster them using various criteria, <em>into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use!</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are a couple of problems with this. First of all, the "that you insist everybody use" part is a pretty blatant <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO">DARVO</a> in the current political environment around Yudkowsky's social sphere. A lot of the opposition to self-chosen pronouns is about opposition to <em>compelled speech</em>: people who don't think some trans person's transition should "count"—however cruel or capricious that might be—don't want to be coerced into legitimizing it with the pronoun choices in their <em>own</em> speech. That's different from insisting that <em>others</em> use sex-based non-subject-preferred pronouns, which is not something I see much of outside of gender-critical ("TERF") forums. That is, in the world I see, the pronouns-by-self-identity faction is <em>overwhelmingly</em> the one "insist[ing] everybody use" their preferred convention. Characterizing the issue as being about "freedom of pronouns", <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228">as Yudkowsky does in the comment section</a>, elides the fact that freedom to specify how <em>other people</em> talk about you is in direct conflict with the freedom of speech of speakers! No matter which side of the conflict one supports, it seems wrong to characterize the self-ID pronoun side as being "pro-freedom", as if there weren't any "freedom" concerns on the other side.</p>
<p>If you <em>actually</em> believed it was Shenanigans to bake a stance on how clustered things are into a pronoun system and insist that everyone else use it, then it should be <em>equally</em> Shenanigans independently of whether the insisted-on clusters are those of sex or those of gender identity—if you're going to be consistent, you should condemn them <em>both</em>. And yet <em>somehow</em>, people who insist on sex-based pronouns are the target of Yudkowsky's condescension, whereas people who insist on gender-identity-based pronouns get both a free pass, <em>and</em> endorsement of their preferred convention (albeit for a different stated reason)? The one-sidedness here is pretty shameless!</p>
<p>Perhaps more important than the speaker-freedom <em>vs.</em> subject-freedom issue, however, is that in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">cultural evolution</a> of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have <em>ipso facto</em> changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually <em>do</em> have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can <em>advocate</em> for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just <em>declare</em> your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just <em>is</em> the normative definition" doesn't work.</p>
<p>To be clear, when I say that the proposal doesn't work, I'm not even saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, <em>factually</em> doesn't work! Let me explain.</p>
<p>The "meaning" of language isn't some <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies">epiphenomenal</a> extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage. We can only say that the English word "dog" means <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog">these-and-such four-legged furry creatures</a>, <em>because</em> English speakers actually use the word that way. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution">The meaning "lives" in the systematic correspondence between things in the world and what communication signals are sent.</a></p>
<p>There's nothing magical about the particular word/symbol/phoneme-sequence "dog", of course. In German, they say <em>Hund</em>; in Finnish, they say <em>koira</em>; in Korean, they say <em>개</em>. Germans and Finns and Koreans (and their dogs) seem to be getting along just as well as we Anglophones.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, it is a fact <em>about contemporary English</em> that "dog" means dog. If you thought this was bad for whatever reason, and you wanted to change that fact, you'd have to change the behavior of actually-existing English speakers. If you tried to stipulate on your Facebook wall that the word "dog" should mean <em>tree</em> now, and all of your Facebook friends nodded in agreement at your clever argument <em>and then continued to call dogs "dogs" and trees "trees" in their everyday life just like they always had</em>, then your language reform attempt would have, <em>in fact</em>, failed—even if the fact that it failed would be less obvious if you only looked at the Facebook thread full of people nodding in agreement.</p>
<p>Or suppose I wrote a Facebook post arguing that it's bad language design that "billion" means 1,000,000,000 instead of 2001. You see, the etymology comes from the prefix <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bi-">bi-</a> (meaning two, from the Latin <em>bis</em>), combined with <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mille#Latin"><em>mille</em></a> (Latin for 1000), combined with the <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/augmentative#English">augmentive</a> suffix <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-one#Italian"><em>-one</em></a>. How do you get 10<sup>9</sup> from that, huh? (It turns out there's <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-illion#English">an explanation</a>, but I don't find it intuitive.) Clearly, it's better language design if the meaning of number words straightforwardly reflects their parts, so "billion" should mean 2001 (<em>bi-</em>, <em>mille</em>, -<em>one</em>; 2, times 1000, plus 1).</p>
<p>Even if you found this argument compelling from an theoretical language-design perspective after it had been presented to you, if I were to subsequently go around calling myself a <em>billionaire</em> (and condescendingly Tweeting about how anyone objecting to this usage is ontologically confused), you would probably suspect that I had some <em>other reason</em> to come up with this <em>particular</em> theoretical language-design argument—probably a reason having to do with what "billion" <em>already</em> means in the usage of actually-existing English speakers, <em>even if</em> you honestly think the existing English language is poorly designed in that aspect.</p>
<p>The inseparability of meaning from behavior-and-usage may be clearer if considered in a context other than that of natural language. Take computer programs. Sometimes programmers make bad design decisions. For example, in the C programming language, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string">it's standard to represent strings (textual data) in memory with a sequence of bytes ending in a zero (null) character</a>; the machine only knows where the string stops when it reaches the null at the end. This convention has a lot of disadvantages relative to the alternative of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_(computer_science)#Length-prefixed">prefixing the string data with the length</a>; a missing or misplaced null character could cause the machine to erroneously read or write data in adjacent memory, causing serious bugs or security vulnerabilities.</p>
<p>Given the existence of strong arguments for the length-prefixed string convention, replacing old software that uses null-terminated strings with new software that uses length-prefixed strings, sounds like a good idea! But the thing is, you <em>do</em> have to upgrade or replace the old software. If you <em>just</em> start sending data in a new format to the old software that doesn't understand the new format, your code is not going to yield the expected results. It would be <em>convenient</em> if you could just declare a new semantics for your existing data on your Facebook wall and be done, but that just doesn't work if you're still using the old software, which is programmed to behave according to the old data-interpretation convention. This continues to be true even if the convention you're trying to retire is very bad (like null-terminated strings), and if the old software is widely deployed and would be very expensive to systematically replace. The backwards-compatibility trap <a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1216799697907486720">is real and can't be defied away even if it's very unpleasant.</a></p>
<p>Natural language faces a similar backwards-compatibility trap. The English language, as "software", is <em>already</em> "deployed" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers#Top_languages_by_population">to 370 million brains as native speakers, and another 980 million second-language speakers</a>. And among those hundreds of millions of speakers, there is <em>already</em> a very firmly entrenched convention that <em>she</em> refers to females and <em>he</em> refers to males, such that if you say, "I met a stranger in the park; she was nice", the listener is going to assume the the stranger was (or appeared to be) female, even if you didn't say "The stranger was female" as a separate sentence. If the listener later gets the chance to meet the stranger and the stranger turns out to be (or appear to be) male, the listener is going to be <em>surprised</em>: your pronoun choice induced them to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">mis-anticipate their experiences</a>.</p>
<p>Bad language design? I mean, maybe! You could argue that! You could probably get a lot of Likes on Facebook arguing that! But if 370 million native English speakers <em>including you and virtually everyone who Liked your post</em> are going to <em>continue</em> automatically noticing what sex people are (or appear to be) and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it (in accordance with the "default for those-who-haven't-asked" clause of your reform proposal), then the criticism seems kind of idle!</p>
<p>The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is <em>trying</em> to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem by being backwards-compatible—prescribing the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language.</p>
<p>To <em>actually</em> de-gender English while keeping <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> (as contrasted to coordinating a jump to universal singular <em>they</em>, or <em>ve</em>), you'd need to <em>actually</em> shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns <em>were</em> just an arbitrary extra piece of data that you couldn't deduce from secondary sex characteristics and just needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names and can't deduce them from their appearances. But as far as I can tell, <em>no one</em> wants this. When's the last time you heard someone request pronouns for <em>non</em>-gender-related reasons? ("My pronouns are she/her—but note, that's <em>just</em> because I prefer the aesthetics of how the pronouns sound; I'm <em>not</em> in any way claiming that you should believe that I'm in any sense female, which isn't true.") Me neither.</p>
<p>But given that pronouns <em>do</em> convey sex-category information, as a <em>fact</em> about how the brains of actually-existing English speakers <em>in fact</em> process language (whether or not this means that English is terribly designed), some actually-existing English speakers might have reason to object when pressured to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.</p>
<p>In an article titled <a href="https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/">"Pronouns are Rohypnol"</a>, Barra Kerr compares preferred pronouns to the famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect">Stroop effect</a>. When color words are printed in text of a different color (<em>e.g.</em>, <span style="color:blue;">red</span>, <span style="color:green">orange</span>, <span style="color:red">yellow</span>, <span style="color:purple">green</span>, <span style="color:orange">blue</span>, <em>&c.</em>) and people are asked to name the color of the text, they're slow to respond: the meaning of the word interferes with our ability to name the color in front of our eyes.</p>
<p>Kerr suggests that preferred pronouns have a similar effect, that "a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us." As an exercise, she suggests (privately!) translating sentences about transgender people to use natal-sex-based pronouns.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I don't have a study with objective measurements on hand, but I think most native English speakers who try this exercise and introspect—especially using examples where the trans person exhibits features or behavior typical of their natal sex, with things like "she ejaculated" or "he gave birth" being the starkest examples—will <a href="https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/">agree</a> with Kerr's assessment: "You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them <em>she</em> instead of <em>he</em>."</p>
<p>Let's relate this to Yudkowsky's specialty of artificial intelligence. In a post on <a href="https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/">"Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks"</a>, Gabriel Goh <em>et al.</em> explore the capabilities and biases of the <a href="https://openai.com/blog/clip/">CLIP</a> neural network trained on textual and image data.</p>
<p>There are some striking parallels between CLIP's behavior, and phenomena observed in neuroscience. Neurons in the human brain have been observed to respond to the same concept represented in different modalities; for example, <a href="/papers/quiroga_et_al-invariant_visual_representation_by_single_neurons.pdf">Quiroga <em>et al.</em></a> observed a neuron in one patient that responded to photos and sketches of actress Halle Berry, as well as the text string "Halle Berry". It turns out that CLIP neurons also exhibit this multi-modal responsiveness. Furthermore, CLIP is vulnerable to a Stroop-like effect where its image-classification capabilities can be fooled by "typographic attacks"—a dog with instances of the text "$$$" superimposed over it gets classified as a piggy bank, an apple with a handwritten sign saying "LIBRARY" gets classified as a library. The network knows perfectly what dogs and apples look like, and yet still reacts differently if adjacent text calls them something else.</p>
<p>I conjecture that the appeal of subject-chosen pronouns lies <em>precisely</em> in how they exert Stroop-like effects on speakers' and listeners' cognition. (Once again, if it were <em>actually true</em> that <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> had no difference in meaning, <em>there would be no reason to care</em>.) <a href="/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/">Pronoun badges</a> are, quite literally, a typographic attack against English speakers' brains.</p>
<p>Note, I mean this as a value-free description of how the convention <em>actually functions</em> in the real world, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N9oKuQKuf7yvCCtfq/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally">not a condemnation</a>. One could consistently hold that these "attacks" are morally good. (Analogously, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization">supernormal stimuli</a> like chocolate or pornography are "attacks" against the brain's evolved nutrition and reproductive-opportunity detectors, but most people are fine with this, because our goals are not evolution's.)</p>
<p>Is susceptibility to Stroop-like effects an indication of bad mind design? I mean, probably! One would expect that an intelligently-designed agent (as contrasted to messy human brains coughed up by <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jAToJHtg39AMTAuJo/evolutions-are-stupid-but-work-anyway">blind evolution</a> or <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dpzLqQQSs7XRacEfK/understanding-the-lottery-ticket-hypothesis">lucky</a> neural networks found by gradient descent) could easily bind and re-bind symbols on the fly, such that a sane AI from the future could use whatever pronouns without dredging up any inapplicable mental associations, and tell you the color of the text "<span style="color:blue;">red</span>" just as easily as "<span style="color:red;">red</span>". But it seems kind of idle to criticize humans for not having a capability (natural language fluency without Stroop-like effects) that we don't even know how to implement in a computer program.</p>
<p>Back to Kerr's article—importantly, Kerr is <em>explicitly</em> appealing to psychological effects of different pronoun conventions. She is absolutely <em>not</em> claiming that the use of preferred pronouns is itself a "lie" about some testable proposition. She writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I've heard many people tell me they don't mind doing this, as a courtesy, although it takes some effort to keep up the mental gymnastics of perceiving one sex, but consistently using pronouns for the other. That's a personal choice, and I respect the reasons why some people make it.</p>
<p>I've also heard many people declaring that anyone who won't comply (usually directed at a woman) is obnoxious, mean, hostile, and unpleasant. 'Misgendering' is hate speech. They say.</p>
<p>But I refuse to use female pronouns for anyone male.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Note the wording: "That's a personal choice", "<em>I</em> refuse". Kerr knows perfectly well that people who use gender-identity-based pronouns aren't making a false claim that trans men produce sperm, <em>&c.</em>! Rather, she's saying that a pronoun convention that groups together females, and a minority of males who wish they were female, affects our cognition about that minority of males in a way that's disadvantageous to Kerr's interests (because she wants to be especially alert to threats posed by males), such that Kerr refuses to comply with that convention in her own speech. (Compare to how a Spanish speaker might refuse to address someone they disrespected as <em>usted</em> because of its connotations, without thereby claiming that using <em>usted</em> would make the sentence literally false.)</p>
<p>Relatedly, <a href="/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/">critics of this blog</a> sometimes refer to me as <em>she</em>, reflecting their belief that I'm a trans woman in denial, even though I think of myself of a man (<a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">adult human male</a> not trying to appear otherwise). I never correct them—not just because <a href="/2021/May/interlude-xxi/">it's kind of flattering</a>, and not just because I don't think of myself as having the right to dictate how other people talk about me—but because "she" <em>is</em> the correct pronoun to convey the meaning <em>they're</em> trying to express, whether or not <em>I</em> agree with it.</p>
<p>I take pains to emphasize that pronouns can have meaningful semantics without being denotative statements that can be straightforwardly "false", because Yudkowsky misrepresents what his political opponents are typically claiming, repeatedly trying to frame the matter of dispute as to whether pronouns can be "lies" (to which Yudkowsky says, No, that would be ontologically confused)—whereas if you <em>actually read</em> what the people on the other side of the policy debate are saying, they're largely <em>not claiming</em> that "pronouns are lies"!</p>
<p>This misrepresentation is a serious problem because, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence">as Yudkowsky pointed out in 2007</a>, "To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. Arguing against weaker advocates proves <em>nothing</em>, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." By <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/">selectively drawing attention to the weaker form of the argument</a>, Yudkowsky is likely to leave readers who trusted him to be fair with an unrealistic picture of what people on the other side of the issue actually believe. (Kerr's article seems representative of gender-critical ("TERF") concerns; I've seen the post linked in those circles more than once, and it's cited in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock#Views_on_gender_self-identification">embattled former University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock</a>'s book <em>Material Girls</em>.)</p>
<p>Anyway, given these reasons why the <em>existing</em> meanings of <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?</p>
<p><a id="look-like-an-oliver"></a>Apparently, to play dumb. In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky mentions encountering exotic pronouns on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO">LambdaMOO</a> at age 13 and no one thinking anything of them, and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228">goes on to claim</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>...</p>
<p>I'm sorry, but I can't take this self-report literally. I certainly <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist">don't think Yudkowsky was <em>consciously</em> lying</a> when he wrote that. (When speaking or writing quickly without taking the time to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#2__The_law_of_no_literal_falsehood_">scrupulously check every sentence</a>, it's <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth">common for little untruths and distortions to slip into one's speech</a>. Everyone does it, and if you think you don't, then you're lying.)</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I am <em>incredibly</em> skeptical that Yudkowsky <em>actually</em> doesn't know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to sex categories more firmly than a given name is attached to someone's appearance.</p>
<p>I realize this must seem impossibly rude, presumptuous, and uncharitable of me. Yudkowsky <em>said</em> he doesn't know what it feels like from the inside! That's a report out his own mental state, which he has privileged introspective access to, and I don't! What grounds could I possibly, <em>possibly</em> have to think he's not telling the truth about his own mind? </p>
<p>It's a good question. And my answer is, even without mind-reading technology, people's minds are still part of the same cause-and-effect physical universe that I can (must) make probabilistic inferences about, and verbal self-reports aren't my <em>only</em> source of evidence about someone's mind. In particular, if someone's verbal self-report mis-predicts what we know about their <em>behavior</em>, it's far from clear that we should trust the report more than our senses.</p>
<p>And the thing is, Eliezer Yudkowsky is a native English speaker born in 1979. As a native English speaker born in 1987, I have a <em>pretty good</em> mental model of how native English speakers born in the late 20th century use language. And one of the things native English speakers born in the late 20th century are <em>very good</em> at doing, is noticing what sex people are and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it, because the pronouns are attached to the concept of sex in their heads more firmly than proper names are attached to something in their heads.</p>
<p>I would bet at very generous odds that at some point in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has used <em>she</em> or <em>he</em> on the basis of perceived sex to refer to someone whose name he didn't know. Because <em>all native English speakers do this</em>. Moreover, we can say something about the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms">cognitive algorithm</a> underlying <em>how</em> they do this. <a href="/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf">People can recognize sex from facial photos <em>alone</em> (hair covered, males clean-shaven) at 96% accuracy</a>. In naturalistic settings where we can see and hear more <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic#In_humans">secondary sex characteristics</a> than just someone's face (build, height, breasts, <a href="/papers/puts_et_al-masculine_voices_signal_mens_threat_potential.pdf">voice</a>, <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/">gait</a>, <em>&c</em>.), accuracy would be even greater. It's not a mystery why people can get sex-based pronouns "right" the vast majority of the time without having to be told or remember specific people's pronouns.</p>
<p>Conversely, I would also bet at very generous odds that in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has very rarely if ever assumed what someone's name is on the basis of their appearance without being told. Because <em>no native English speakers do this</em> (seriously, rather than as a joke or a troll). Now, it's true that the "doesn't look like an Oliver" example <em>was</em> introduced into the discussion by another commenter, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159422872574228">who recounts once having called someone Bill who had introduced himself as Oliver</a> for that reason:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It did feel a little weird calling him Oliver, but everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk and teenagers are horrible. The "feels like lying" principle seems like it lets me keep calling him Bill, now righteously. I just can't even really bring myself to play in that sandbox in good faith.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the "everyone present knew what I was doing was being a jerk" characterization seems to agree that the motivation was joking/trolling. <em>How</em> did everyone present know? Because it's absurd to infer a <em>particular</em> name from someone's appearance.</p>
<p>It's true that there are name–feature correlations that observers can pick up on. For example, a "Juan" is likely to be Latino, a "Gertrude" in the current year is <a href="https://www.everything-birthday.com/name/f/Gertrude">likely to be old</a>; a non-Hispanic white Juan or a young Gertrude may indeed be likely to provoke a "Doesn't look like an <em>X</em>" reaction (which may also be sensitive to even subtler features). But while probabilistic inferences from features to <em>low likelihood</em> of a particular name are valid, an inference from features to a particular name is absolutely not, because the function of a name is to be an opaque "pointer" to a particular individual. A Latino family choosing a name for their male baby may be somewhat more likely to choose "Juan" rather than "Oliver" (or "Gertrude"), but they could just as easily choose "Luis" or "Miguel" or "Alejandro" for the very same child, and there's no plausible physical mechanism by which a horrible teenager thirty years later could tell the difference.</p>
<p>Thus, I reject the commenter's claim that "feels like lying" intuitions about pronouns and sex would have let her "keep calling him Bill, now righteously". What algorithm you would use to infer that someone's name is "Bill" based on how he looks? What are the "secondary Oliver characteristics", specifically? People for whom it was <em>actually true</em> that names map to appearances the way pronouns map to sex, should not have trouble answering these questions!</p>
<p>If there <em>were</em> a substantial contingent of native English speakers who don't interpret pronouns as conveying sex category information, one would expect this to show up in our cultural corpus more often—and yet, I'm actually not aware of any notable examples of this. In contrast, it's very easy to find instances of speakers treating pronouns and sex as synonymous. As an arbitrarily chosen example, in <a href="https://theamazingworldofgumball.fandom.com/wiki/The_Nest">one episode</a> of the animated series <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball"><em>The Amazing World of Gumball</em></a> featuring the ravenous spawn of our protagonists' evil pet turtle, the anthropomorphic-rabbit <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad">Bumbling Dad</a> character <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N2Msnrq7wU&t=14s">says, "Who's to say this pregnant turtle is a <em>her</em>?" and everyone gives him a look</a>.</p>
<p>The joke, you see, is that bunny-father is unthinkingly applying the stock question "Who's to say <em>X</em> is a he/she?" (which makes sense when <em>X</em> is, <em>e.g.</em>, "the nurse") in a context where there's an obvious answer—namely, that the referents of "her" pronouns are female and only females get pregnant—but the character is too stupid to notice this, and we enjoy a laugh at his expense.</p>
<p><em>The Amazing World of Gumball</em> is rated <a href="https://rating-system.fandom.com/wiki/TV-Y7">TV-Y7</a> and the episode in question came out in 2016. This is not a particularly foreign or distant cultural context, nor one that is expected to tax the cognitive abilities of a seven-year-old child! Is ... is Yudkowsky claiming not to get the joke?</p>
<p>Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky <em>does</em> get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously <em>honestly</em> claim to "not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to quickly make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if">iff</a> female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." How else am I supposed to interpret those words?</p>
<p>Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, by dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? And yet, on the contrary, looking over his works, we can see instances of Yudkowsky treating pronouns as synonymous with sex (just as one would expect a native English speaker born in 1979 to do), contrary to his 2021 self-report of not knowing what this feels like from the inside.</p>
<p>For example, in Yudkowsky's 2001 <em>Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures</em>, the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15">footnote 16</a>: "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "<em>is</em> male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.</p>
<p>A perhaps starker example comes in the comments to Yudkowsky's 2009 short story <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKu66pFKDHFYPaZ6q/the-hero-with-a-thousand-chances">"The Hero With A Thousand Chances"</a>. A commenter (in the guise of a decision theory thought experiment) inquired whether Yudkowsky flipped a coin to determine the protagonist's gender, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKu66pFKDHFYPaZ6q/the-hero-with-a-thousand-chances?commentId=dyADWqquWFHeNMQiJ">to which Yudkowsky replied</a> (bolding mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ha! I <em>tried</em> doing that, the generator came up female ... and <strong>I realized that I couldn't make Aerhien a man</strong>, and that having two "hers" and "shes" would make the dialogue harder to track.</p>
<p>Sometimes a random number generator only tells you what you already know.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the text of the story doesn't <em>say</em> Aerhien isn't a "man"; it merely refers to her with she/her pronouns! If Yudkowsky "couldn't make [the character] a man", but the only unambiguous in-text consequence of this is that the character takes she/her pronouns, that would seem to be treating sex and pronouns as synonymous; the comment <em>only makes sense</em> if Yudkowsky thinks the difference between <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> is semantically meaningful. (It's possible that he changed his mind about this between 2009 and 2021, but if so, you'd expect the 2021 Facebook discussion to explain why he changed his mind, rather than claiming that he "do[es] not know what it feels like from the inside" to hold the position implied by his 2009 comments.)</p>
<p>In the Facebook comments, Yudkowsky continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My current policy stance is that anybody who does feel that way needs to get some perspective about how it can be less firmly attached in other people's heads; and how their feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol or accuse non-protocol users of lying; especially when different people with firm attachments have <em>different</em> firm attachments and we can't make them all be protocol.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The sheer <em>chutzpah</em> here is jaw-dropping. Someone's feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol, huh? But—the causal–historical reason we're discussing pronoun reform <em>at all</em> is <em>precisely</em> to let trans people's feelings control everybody's language protocol! The original post is very explicit about this! It says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even <em>before</em> considering all gender issues, there is some sense in which somebody saying "help help pronouns attacking" sounds to me like a sympathetic innocent asking to get out from under a bad system, not like a law-deuniversalizer asking for exceptions from a good system.</p>
<p>In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Okay, so Yudkowsky never thought sex-based pronouns were a good idea in the first place. But the <em>important thing</em>, he says, is that some people ("who are people", Yudkowsky pleonastically clarifies, as if anyone had doubted this) don't want other people to use language that refers to what sex they are.</p>
<p>Personally, I have a <em>lot</em> of sympathy for this, because in an earlier stage of my ideological evolution, I <em>was</em> one of those people. (I <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials">tried to use an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and byline for a while in the late 'aughts</a>, and while I never asked for new pronouns, this is probably a matter of Overton window placement rather than any underlying difference in sentiments; it seems pretty likely that my analogue growing up in the current year's ideological environment would be a trans woman.)</p>
<p>But it's important to not use sympathy as an excuse to blur together different rationales, or obfuscate our analysis of the costs and benefits to different parties of different policies. "Systematically de-gender English because that's a superior language design" and "Don't misgender trans people because trans people are sympathetic" are <em>different</em> political projects with different victory conditions: victory for the de-genderers would mean singular <em>they</em> or similar for everyone (as a matter of language design, no idiosyncratic personal exceptions), which is very different from the <a href="https://www.mypronouns.org/asking">ask-and-share-pronouns norms</a> championed by contemporary trans rights activists.</p>
<p>Perhaps it might make sense for adherents of a "degender English" movement to strategically <em>ally</em> with the trans rights movement: to latch on to gender-dysphoric people's pain as a political weapon to destabilize what the English-degenderers think of as a bad pronoun system for <em>other reasons</em>. Fine.</p>
<p>But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to <em>honestly</em> claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you piously proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be participating in an attempt to make it so that "[someone's] feelings [...] get to control everybody's language protocol"! Again, how else am I supposed to interpret those words?</p>
<p>There's nothing <em>inconsistent</em> about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter <em>as much</em>, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to tell people like Barra Kerr is, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you", rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are <em>clearly not making</em> if you <em>actually read what they write</em>.</p>
<p>(In general, an honest "sucks to be you" from someone whose political incentives lead them to oppose your goals, is <em>much</em> less cruel than the opponent distorting your position to make you look bad to their followers.)</p>
<p>All this having been said, Yudkowsky <em>is</em> indeed correct to note that "when different people with firm attachments have <em>different</em> firm attachments [...] we can't make them all be protocol". It's possible for observers to disagree about what sex category they see someone as belonging to, and it would be awkward at best for different speakers in a conversation to use different pronouns to refer to the same subject.</p>
<p>As it happens, I think this <em>is</em> an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests">When different parties disagree about what category something should belong to, but want to coordinate to use the <em>same</em> category, they tend to find some mutually-salient Schelling point to settle the matter.</a> In the case of disagreements about a person's social sex category, in the absence of a trusted central authority to break the symmetry among third parties' judgments (like a priest or rabbi in a tight-knit religious community, or a medical bureaucracy with the social power to diagnose who is "legitimately" transsexual), the most obvious Schelling point is to defer to the person themselves. I wrote about this argument in a previous post, <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">"Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"</a>.</p>
<p>But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, <em>doesn't</em> mean we have a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided">one-sided policy debate</a> where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to actually-existing English speakers is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.</p>
<p>Although they're not the only ones with an structural advantage: a social order whose gender convention was "Biological sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing; sucks to be you if you want people to believe that you're the sex that you aren't" would <em>also</em> be a Schelling point. (Trans people's <a href="/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/">developmental sex</a> is not really in dispute.) It's the <em>moderates</em> who want to be nice to trans people <em>without</em> destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!</p>
<p>Still, I think most people reading this post <em>are</em> "moderates" in this sense. Schelling points are powerful. If we're <em>not</em> culturally-genocidal extremists who want to exclude transsexuals from Society (and therefore reject the "pronouns = sex, no exceptions" Schelling point), isn't it reasonable that we end up at the self-identity Schelling point—at least as far as the trivial courtesy of pronouns is concerned, even if some of the moderates want to bargain for the right to use natal-sex categories in some contexts?</p>
<p>Sure. Yes. And indeed, I don't misgender people! (In public. Only rarely in private, when someone's transition doesn't seem legitimate or serious to me, and the person I'm talking to doesn't seem liable to object.) I'm not arguing that Yudkowsky should misgender people! The purpose of this post is not to argue with Yudkowsky's pronoun usage, but rather to argue with the offered usage <em>rationale</em> that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just <em>is</em> the normative definition."</p>
<p>As I have explained at length, this <em>rationale</em> doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like sincere belief in gender identity, or the Schelling point argument, can end up recommending the same behavior). <em>No one</em> actually believes (as contrasted to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief">believing that they believe</a>) that <em>she</em> and <em>he</em> aren't attached to gender in people's heads, despite Yudkowsky's sneering claim in the comments that he <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228">"would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character."</a></p>
<p>Again, without attributing to Yudkowsky any <em>conscious, deliberative</em> intent to deceive (because of the tragic human tendency to unconsciously introduce distortions in the heat of a rapid argument), the <em>pants-on-fire audacity</em> of this <em>ludicrous</em> claim to ignorance still beggars belief. As the author of <a href="http://www.hpmor.com/">one of the world's most popular <em>Harry Potter</em> fanfictions</a>, Yudkowsky clearly knows something about about how to simulate alternative perspectives (includes ones he disagrees with) and portray them sympathetically. And he claims to be <em>unable</em> to do this for ... the idea that pronouns imply sex, and that using the pronouns that imply someone is the sex that they are not feels analogous to lying? Really?!</p>
<p>Well, I'm not a popular fiction author with thousands of obsessive fans who pore over my every word, but if Yudkowsky claims not to be up to this writing challenge, I'm happy to give him a hand and show him how it might be done—</p>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<p>A cis woman is testifying in court about a brutal rape that horrifically traumatized her. The rapist has since transitioned.</p>
<p>"And then—" says the victim, reliving those awful moments, "and then, he took his erect penis—"</p>
<p>"Objection!" says the defense lawyer. "The witness misgendering my client is prejudicial."</p>
<p>"Sustained," says the judge. Then, to the victim: "<em>Her</em> erect penis."</p>
<p>"Wh—what?" says the victim.</p>
<p>"You will refer to the defendant with the correct pronoun, or I'll hold you in contempt of court."</p>
<p>"Oh. O–okay. And then—then, she took her—" The victim breaks down crying. "I'm sorry, Your Honor; I can't do it. I'm under oath; I have to tell the story the way it happened to me. In my memories, the person who did those things to me was a man. A—"</p>
<p>She hesitates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more than the memories of the rape, she is very conscious of having never gone to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and <em>they</em> believe that the man who raped her is now (or perhaps, always had been) a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority figure who she had no hope of out-arguing, if she was even allowed to argue?</p>
<p>"And by 'man', I mean—a male. The way I was raised, men—males—get called <em>he</em> and <em>him</em>. If I say <em>she</em>, it doesn't feel true to the memory in my head. It—it feels like lying, Your Honor."</p>
<p>The judge scoffs. "You are <em>ontologically</em> confused," he sneers. "At age 13 I was programming on LambdaMOO where people had their choice of exotic pronouns and nobody thought anything of it," says the judge. "Denied."</p>
<p>"O-okay," says the victim. She doesn't know what <em>ontologically</em> means, or what a LambdaMOO is. "So then—then sh-she took her erect penis and she—"</p>
<p>She breaks down crying again. "Your Honor, I can't! I can't do it! It's not true! It's not—" She senses that the judge will imply she's stupid for saying it's not true. She gropes for some way of explaining. "I mean—the Court allows people to testify in Spanish or Chinese with the help of a translator, right? Can't you treat my testimony like that? Let me say what happened to me in the words that seem true to me, even if the court does its business using words in a different way?"</p>
<p>"You're in contempt," says the judge. "Bailiff! Take her away!"</p>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<p>Not a sympathetic character? Not even a little bit?</p>
<p>I suspect some readers will have an intuition that my choice of scenario is loaded, unfair, or unrealistic. To be sure, I chose it an unusually clear-cut case for why someone might have a need to use pronouns to imply sex in their <em>own</em> speech. (If the scenario was just talking about someone borrowing a vacuum cleaner, fewer readers would have any sympathy for someone not wanting to concede the trivial courtesy of preferred pronouns.)</p>
<p>But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it? Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? Of course <em>most</em> trans women are not sex offenders—just as <em>most</em> non-transsexual males are not sex offenders—but instances of trans women committing the kinds of sex crimes that are overwhelmingly the province of men <a href="https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/">are a documented thing</a>.</p>
<p>Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance? But this is also an occasionally documented thing, as in <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child">one case where a Canadian father was jailed</a> for violating <a href="https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/19/06/2019BCSC0604.htm">a court order</a> not to refer to his natal-female child with she/her pronouns. As liberal intellectuals debating optimal communication policies, we usually hope to govern by consensus: we want people to use preferred pronouns <em>voluntarily</em>, rather than being forced. But maintaining a collective norm in the face of those who have their own reasons to object to it, does ultimately require some sort of enforcement. In the vignette above, given the defense lawyer's objection, the judge does face a forced choice to Sustain or Overrule, and that choice has consequences either way.</p>
<p>In the comments, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424909869228">Yudkowsky continues</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is <em>not</em> the woke position. The woke position is that when you call somebody "she" because she requested "she", you're validating her gender preference. I may SEPARATELY be happy to validate somebody's gender preference by using the more complex language feature of NOUN PHRASES to construct an actual SENTENCE that refers to her ON PURPOSE as a "woman", but when it comes to PRONOUNS I am not even validating anyone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Right, it's not the woke position. It's an <em>incoherent</em> position that's optimized to concede to the woke the behavior that they want for a <em>different stated reason</em> in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not "politically" motivated. She requested "she" <em>because</em> acceding to the request validates her gender preference in the minds of all native English speakers who are listening, even if Eliezer Yudkowsky has some clever casuistry for why it magically doesn't mean that when <em>he</em> says it.</p>
<p>Again, I'm <em>not</em> saying that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun usage policy. (I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing.) Rather, I'm saying that in order to <em>actually</em> be politically neutral in your analysis of <em>why</em> someone might choose one pronoun usage policy over another, you need to <em>acknowledge</em> the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there <em>is</em> no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on <em>someone</em> and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach <em>some</em> point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about <em>which</em> point, even if most of the fighting hopefully takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)</p>
<p>Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on (for example) a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with <em>she</em>/<em>her</em> pronouns is a <em>cost</em> to her. And, simultaneously, <em>not</em> exerting that pressure is a <em>cost</em> to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender <em>conditional</em> on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional fact that doesn't need to be "earned" or justified in any way.</p>
<p>You might think the cost of making the rape victim say <em>she</em> is worth it, because you want to make it easy for gender-dysphoric people to socially transition, or because you think it's dumb that pronouns imply sex in the actually-existing English language and you see the self-identity convention as an incremental step towards degendering the language.</p>
<p>Fine. That's a perfectly coherent position. But if that's your position and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to <em>acknowledge</em> that your position exerts costs on some actually-existing English speakers who have a use-case for using pronouns to imply sex. You need to be able to look that rape victim in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you."</p>
<p>And of course—it <em>should</em> be needless to say—this applies symmetrically. If you think speakers <em>should</em> be able to misgender according to their judgment and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to be able to look a trans person in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes the freedom of speech of speakers is more important than your gender being recognized; sucks to be you."</p>
<p>Or if you have more important things to worry about (like the fate of a hundred thousand galaxies depending on the exact preferences built into the first artificial superintelligence) and don't want the distraction of taking a position on controversial contemporary social issues, fine: use whatever pronoun convention happens to be dominant in your local social environment, and, if questioned, say, "I'm using the pronoun convention that happens to be dominant in my local social environment." You don't have to invent <em>absurd lies</em> to make it look like the convention that happens to be dominant in your local social environment has no costs.</p>
<p>Really, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could have told you that that's just <em>factually not true</em>; if you grew up speaking English in the late 20th century, you <em>absolutely goddamned well do</em> know what it feels like. Did <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain">the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain</a> really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!</p>
<hr>
<p>At this point, some readers may be puzzled as to the <em>mood</em> of the present post. I <em>agree</em> with Yudkowsky's analysis of the design flaw in English's pronoun system. I <em>also</em> agree that not misgendering trans people is a completely reasonable thing to do, which I also do. I'm <em>only</em> disputing the part where Yudkowsky jumps to declaring his proposed "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's <em>not</em> simple and not <em>unambiguously</em> the best.</p>
<p>Many observers would consider this a very minor disagreement, not something anyone would want to spend 12,000 words prosecuting with as much vitriolic rhetoric as the target audience is likely to tolerate. If I agree with the problem statement (pronouns shouldn't denote sex, that's dumb; why would you define a language that way), and I don't disagree with the proposed policy solution (don't misgender trans people in public), why get so hung up on the exact arguments?</p>
<p>(I mean, <em>besides</em> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line">the fact that it's arguments that matter rather than conclusions, as a completely general principle of correct cognition</a>.)</p>
<p>I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where <em>I need the correct reasoning in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions</em>. Let me explain.</p>
<p>This debate looks very different depending on whether you're coming into it as someone being <em>told</em> that you need to change your pronoun usage for the sake of someone who will be very hurt if you don't—or whether you're in the position of wondering whether it makes sense to <em>make</em> such a request of others.</p>
<p>As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide</a>. While politically convenient for people who have <em>already</em> transitioned and don't want anyone second-guessing their identity, I think this view is actually false. Humans don't have an atomic "gender identity" that they just <em>know</em>, which has no particular properties other than it being worse than death for it to not be recognized by others. Rather, there are a variety of reasons why someone might feel sad about being the sex that they are, and wish they could be the other sex instead, which is called "gender dysphoria."</p>
<p>Fortunately, our Society has interventions available to approximate changing sex as best we can with existing technology: you can get hormone replacement therapy (HRT), genital surgery, ask people to call you by a different name, ask people to refer to you with different pronouns, get new clothes, get other relevant cosmetic surgeries, <em>&c.</em> In principle, it's possible to pick and choose some of these interventions piecemeal—<a href="/tag/hrt-diary/">I actually tried just HRT for five months in 2017</a>—but it's more common for people to "transition", to undergo a correlated <em>bundle</em> of these interventions to approximate a sex change.</p>
<p>On this view, there's not a pre-existing fact of the matter as to whether someone "is trans" as an atomic identity. Rather, gender-dysphoric people have <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/">the option to <em>become</em> trans</a> by means of undergoing the bundle of interventions that constitute transitioning, if they think it will make their life better. But in order for a gender-dysphoric person to <em>decide</em> whether transitioning is a good idea with benefits that exceed the costs, they need <em>factually accurate information</em> about the nature of their dysphoria and each of the component interventions.</p>
<p>If people in a position of intellectual authority provide <em>inaccurate</em> information about transitioning interventions, that's making the lives of gender-dysphoric people worse, because agents with less accurate information make worse decisions (in expectation): if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefited you, or wrongly undergo an intervention that harms you.</p>
<p>For example, I think my five-month HRT experiment was a <em>good</em> decision—I benefited from the experience and I'm very glad I did it, even though I didn't end up staying on HRT long term. The benefits (satisfied curiosity about the experience, breast tissue) exceeded the costs (a small insurance co-pay, sitting through some gatekeeping sessions, the inconvenience of <a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/">wearing a patch</a> or <a href="/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/">taking a pill</a>, <a href="https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html">various slight medical risks including to future fertility</a>).</p>
<p>If someone I trusted as an intellectual authority had falsely told me that HRT makes you go blind and lose the ability to hear music, <em>and I were dumb enough to believe them</em>, then I wouldn't have done it, and I would have missed out on something that benefited me. Such an authority figure would be harming me by means of giving me bad information; I'd be better off if I hadn't trusted them to tell the truth.</p>
<p>In contrast, I think asking everyone in my life to use she/her pronouns for me would be an <em>obviously incredibly bad decision</em>. Because—notwithstanding my clean-shavenness and beautiful–beautiful ponytail and slight gynecomastia from that HRT experiment five years ago—anyone who looks at me can see at a glance that I'm male (as a <em>fact</em> about the real world, however I feel about it). People would comply because they felt obligated to (and apologize profusely when they slipped up), but it wouldn't come naturally, and strangers would always get it wrong without being told—<em>in accordance with</em> the "default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" clause of Yudkowsky's reform proposal, but really because pronouns are firmly attached to sex in their heads. The costs (this tremendous awkwardness and fakeness suffusing <em>all future social interactions involving me</em>) would exceed the benefits (I actually do feel happier about the word <em>she</em>).</p>
<p>I used to trust Yudkowsky as an intellectual authority; his <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/">Sequences</a> from the late 'aughts were so life-alteringly great that I built up a trust that if Eliezer Yudkowsky said something, that thing was probably so, even if I didn't immediately understand why. But these days, Yudkowsky is telling me that 'she' normatively refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'she', and that those who disagree are engaging in logically rude Shenanigans. However, as I have just explained at length, this is bullshit. (Declaring a "normative" meaning on your Facebook wall doesn't rewrite the <em>actual</em> meaning encoded in the brains of 370 million English speakers.) If I were <em>dumb enough to believe him</em>, I might ask people for new pronouns, which would obviously be an incredibly bad decision. (It might be a <em>less</em> bad decision if done in conjunction with a serious gender transition effort, but Yudkowsky's pronoun reform proposal doesn't <em>say</em> "she" is the pronoun for fully-transitioned trans women; it just says you have to ask.) Thus, Yudkowsky is harming a reference class of people that includes more naïve versions of me by giving them bad information; I'm better off because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell the truth.</p>
<p>(I guess I <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science">can't say I wasn't warned</a>.)</p>Links: Amy Wax Bloggingheads Appearances2022-02-23T21:20:00-08:002022-02-23T21:20:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-02-23:/2022/Feb/links-amy-wax-bloggingheads/<p>Watching a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLE67Z_YmSA">few of</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iURajqpbU3E">her</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1vQFMxPk54">appearances</a> on the Glenn Loury show and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8uEbK83BYM">one opposite Adam Serwer</a>, is it weird if I admit that I find something about Amy Wax <em>incredibly attractive</em>? I mean, on a spiritual level—as a female intellectual with <em>no patience</em> for the Egregore. No patience!
<br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Link: "Never Smile at an Autogynephile"2022-02-21T21:55:00-08:002022-02-21T21:55:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2022-02-21:/2022/Feb/link-never-smile-at-an-autogynephile/<iframe width="460" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6vI6U0QJtPQ" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vI6U0QJtPQ">This song</a> is an interesting cultural artifact of <a href="/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/">the strategy of stigmatization</a>. Lyrics—</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Never smile at an autogynephile<br>
No you can't get friendly with an autogynephile<br>
Don't be taken in by his narcissist grin<br>
He's imagining how well he'll fit within your skin</em> </p>
<p><em>Never smile at an autogynephile<br>
Never meet …</em></p></blockquote><iframe width="460" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6vI6U0QJtPQ" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vI6U0QJtPQ">This song</a> is an interesting cultural artifact of <a href="/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/">the strategy of stigmatization</a>. Lyrics—</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Never smile at an autogynephile<br>
No you can't get friendly with an autogynephile<br>
Don't be taken in by his narcissist grin<br>
He's imagining how well he'll fit within your skin</em> </p>
<p><em>Never smile at an autogynephile<br>
Never meet his eye or stay to talk a while<br>
Turn around, run away, do not join the games he'll play<br>
He wants your place, he'll take your face <br>
That autogynephile</em> </p>
<p><em>[...]<br>
But please be rude and always mock<br>
Or he might show his lady cock<br>
Crossing boundaries makes him smile<br>
That autogynephile</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a purely descriptive sense, this would seem to qualify as "hate speech"—expressing antipathy for a group of people on the basis of sexual orientation. But if so, I count it as evidence for the case that, contrary to popular belief, hate speech <em>is</em> free speech (that is, you can't just exclude "hate" without thereby excluding substantive content): from the standpoint of women <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">fighting a Total Culture War</a> to protect single-sex spaces and the very concept of womanhood itself, it makes <em>perfect sense</em> to demonize the demographic that is, <em>in fact</em>, collectively responsible for your woes. (In a world where autogynephilia as a psychological phenomenon didn't exist "but everything else was the same", there would be no need for a special "gender-critical" resistance strain of feminism to exist; androphilic MtF transsexuals mostly just don't cause problems.)</p>
<p>Just because it <em>makes sense</em> for some people to hate (given the situation they're in) doesn't mean the situation itself isn't sad. <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">I think autogynephilia is a <em>better explanation</em> than "gender identity" for people like me</a>—while I haven't transitioned, I'm obviously <em>the type</em> that would have, had I been born ten years later—and I think it's sad that most of the people who use <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/"><em>the word for the thing</em></a> are ... people who hate us. (Never smile at an autogynephile! Never even meet his eye or stay to talk a while! Please be rude and always mock!)</p>
<p>I don't think it <em>had</em> to be this way. If the hatred is coming from disgust that "he's imagining how well he'll fit within your skin"—well, that doesn't seem negotiable. (We are, in fact, imagining it.) But if the issue is that "crossing boundaries makes him smile"—I don't think that's inherent! You could totally imagine a Society with a designated third-gender role for transsexuals that maintained boundaries for women in some contexts! I think that could be an good Society for everyone to live in (even if trans women from <em>our</em> Society don't find the idea of compromise appealing, because our culture doesn't have the right concepts).</p>Link: "Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬"2021-09-30T09:35:00-07:002021-09-30T09:35:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-09-30:/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/<p>Ha ha, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water">those <em>Less Wrong</em> guys sure love dolphins for whatever reason!</a> <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water">(Alternative viewer.)</a> Note that the "root of the causal graph" argument here for the relevance of phylogenetics is equivalent to <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#chromosomes">the case that sex chromosomes are a good way to operationalize <em>sex</em> in humans</a>—it's not that anyone …</p><p>Ha ha, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water">those <em>Less Wrong</em> guys sure love dolphins for whatever reason!</a> <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water">(Alternative viewer.)</a> Note that the "root of the causal graph" argument here for the relevance of phylogenetics is equivalent to <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#chromosomes">the case that sex chromosomes are a good way to operationalize <em>sex</em> in humans</a>—it's not that anyone directly sees chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; it's that chromosomes are the "switch" upstream of the development of all other sex differences. Talking about the setting of the switch (which you don't <em>intrinsically</em> care about) is a concise way to sum over the many, many high-dimensional details that you do care about.</p>I Don't Do Policy2021-09-28T05:00:00-07:002021-09-28T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-09-28:/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/<p>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 <em>describe</em> what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control …</p><p>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 <em>describe</em> what's actually going on in the world without being delusional about how much control I have over it. I think my account of what's actually going on is potentially a <em>relevant input</em> into someone's computation of deciding what <em>they</em> should do, but almost everything I say is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions. (And the only decisions I can <em>control</em> are my own.)</p>
<p>People will see something like my <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"</a>, and ask, "Okay, but what's the <em>policy takeaway</em> here? Are you saying we should refuse to use trans people's preferred pronouns? Are you saying non-well-passing trans people should detransition?"</p>
<p>No! I'm not saying that!</p>
<p>"Then what <em>are</em> you saying?"</p>
<p>I'm saying—exactly what I said in the 6500-word blog post. Are ... are you asking for a <em>summary</em>, or—</p>
<p>"We're asking what you're telling us we should <em>do</em>."</p>
<p>I don't know what <em>you</em> should do! Why would I know that? (Also, what does this "should" thing even <em>mean</em>, anyway?)</p>
<p>I'm <em>saying</em> that useful words correspond to predictively useful concepts, and that biological sex is a predictively useful concept, and that there are at least two distinct classes of psychological motivation for why some males wish they could change sex, one of which is not an intersex condition, and that our currently-existing hormonal and surgical interventions for approximating a sex change are imperfect, such that there are some circumstances where someone making predictions or decisions about a trans person might want to base those predictions or decisions on the person's <a href="/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/">developmental sex</a> rather than their target gender, and to use corresponding non-obfuscated language in the context of those circumstances.</p>
<p>That <em>doesn't</em> mean that no one should transition (<em>i.e.</em>, try to approximate changing sex with hormonal and surgical interventions)! A lot of people do it—I'm not, like, denying that they <em>exist</em>. It seems to work out pretty well for many of them! Maybe <em>more</em> people should do it!</p>
<p>But in order for someone to <em>figure out</em> whether or not to do it—and in order for the people they interact with to figure out how to react—it would probably help to <em>get the theory right</em>: the biology and psychology and sociology and cognitive science and political science of what sex and gender actually <em>are</em> in the real physical universe, and under what conditions they might actually in-fact be changed. Get the theory right <em>first</em>, and <em>then</em> use the theory to make the best decisions.</p>
<p>And if different people's interests come into conflict, such that there <em>is no</em> collective decision that everyone is happy with, I can still hope to objectively catalogue the possible outcomes of the conflict—what happens if who wins, and what the space of available armistice agreements looks like.</p>
<p>I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to sometimes bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be <em>true</em>.) But I can at least make an effort to <em>minimize</em> the extent to which that happens—and to <em>make it clear</em> which paragraphs and posts I write are advocating for my preferences (which are likely to not be shared by others) and which are trying to perform an objective analysis (which is information anyone can benefit from). But <em>for the most part</em>, I don't do policy. The victory condition of my political campaign is not defined in terms of how many people end up transitioning, but <em>just</em> getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise alternative succeeds it) into the <em>standard</em> sex-ed textbooks—because I think the taxonomy is, to a first approximation, <em>actually true</em>, and not a lie or even a self-fulfilling prophecy. The further question as to whether autogynephilia should be regarded as recommending transition or not is a policy question and explicitly out-of-scope.</p>
<p>I've gotten praise from trans-activist types (<em>e.g.</em>, for <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">"Lesser-Known Demand Curves"</a>), and from gender-critical feminists (<em>e.g.</em>, for <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">"Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"</a>). If I could just get them to praise the <em>same post</em>, then I will have succeeded as a writer.</p>There Should Be a Closetspace/Lease Bound Crossover Fic2021-09-26T22:00:00-07:002021-09-26T22:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-09-26:/2021/Sep/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic/<p>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 <em>arbitrary</em> webcomics of similar comparative obscurity.</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/index.htm"><em>Closetspace</em></a> is the story of a boy named …</p><p>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 <em>arbitrary</em> webcomics of similar comparative obscurity.</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/index.htm"><em>Closetspace</em></a> is the story of a boy named Jason who decides to live as a girl named Carrie in Texas of the late '90s or early 'aughts. Escaping family disapproval, Carrie moves in with a new housemate, Allison. The twist in the premise is, it turns out that Allison is <em>also</em> a male-to-female transsexual, but <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/31.htm">neither is aware of the other's secret</a>.</p>
<p>The series follows Carrie and Allison as they face life's challenges—<a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/34.htm">their house gets attacked by a insurrectionist</a>; Carrie gets <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/48.htm">accidentally kidnapped by a dominatrix</a> <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/53.htm">(who is <em>also</em> trans)</a>; <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/83.htm">Allison copes with regrets about her own transition</a>; Carrie's mom <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/81.htm">has a stroke</a> <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/153.htm">and dies</a>, and Carrie <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/160.htm">faces pushback</a> (<a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/164.htm">including from</a> her <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/15.htm">previously mostly supportive</a> sister) after showing up <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/90.htm">at the hospital</a> and <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/158.htm">to the funeral</a> <em>as</em> Carrie, causing her to <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/178.htm">develop social anxiety</a>; Allison <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/193.htm">gets addicted to an old video game</a>, connects with <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/116.htm">an interior-decorating client</a> and <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/317.htm">an old friend</a>; Carrie's drag queen friend <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/266.htm">also dies</a>.</p>
<p>It wasn't something I noticed when I first encountered <em>Closetspace</em> around 2010 or so, but knowing <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">what I know now</a>, it's really striking how much the Blanchardian <a href="/tag/two-type-taxonomy/">two-type taxonomy</a> shines through in the course of telling Carrie's story, not because the author intended any such reading, but because the taxonomic structure in human psychology is going to show up when you tell a story that's true to human life. (Recap for new readers: there are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology">two etiologically distinct types of male-to-female transsexuals</a>—an androphilic type coterminous with the most effeminate gay men, and an <em>autogynephilic</em> type—<a href="/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf">"men who love women and want to become what they love"</a>.)</p>
<p>The author probably doesn't believe in the typology (if she's even heard of it), but <em>the traits line up anyway</em>. Carrie is straight—gynephilic (<a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/16.htm">"Guys just aren't my thing"</a>, she tells her sister). Carrie's gay (androphilic) drag queen friend Victor/Victoria <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/67.htm">doesn't understand Carrie's motivations</a>: "Not to mention you don't <em>think</em> like one of 'them'", she comments on Carrie's lack of innate femininity. (Anyone can see that effeminate gay men taking on female roles "make sense"; autogynephilia is harder to understand if you haven't yourself felt the tug of the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.) Allison's recollection of her origins includes a moment of envy about a girl: <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/342.htm">"she looks so pretty ... so pretty"</a>. Heidi the (male) dominatrix <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/268.htm">displays a working knowledge of the typology while coming on to Carrie</a>: "We're both crossdressers, and we aren't anything like drag queens [...] sometimes I want to hang out with someone like me. Someone like you." Indeed!</p>
<p>Likewise, Carrie's <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity">beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings</a> (<a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/231.htm">"And I feel a longing ... like I'd had a body like that once upon a time, and want it back"</a>) and <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/239.htm">stirring post-transition</a> <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/09/10/meta-attraction-cannot-account-for-all-autogynephiles-interest-in-men/">meta-attraction</a> are <em>on type</em>.</p>
<p>A point of skepticism on the premise: it doesn't feel realistic to me that Allison doesn't clock Carrie given that Carrie is <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/55.htm"><em>not on hormones yet</em></a>. Passing is <em>hard</em>, especially when you're <em>living with someone</em>, rather than just seeing them "in passing" in public. No one mistakes <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/23.htm">the Texas insurrectionist woman</a> as a man even though she has short hair and wears men's clothes. And Carrie <em>sings</em>! (Vocal pitch is hugely sexually dimorphic; <a href="/papers/puts_et_al-masculine_voices_signal_mens_threat_potential.pdf">one study reports</a> the sex difference in mean <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_frequency">fundamental frequency</a> at Cohen's <em>d</em> ≈ 5.7, which is so huge that I can't quite take it at face value insofar as it implies that Tracy Chapman (whose <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwrHwZyFN7M">singing</a> I've mis-sexed) should outright not exist, rather than merely being very rare.) I feel kind of vindicated that a <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/357.htm">guest illustrator gave Carrie a realistically unfortunate face</a>.</p>
<p>Okay, Heidi <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/340.htm">who <em>is</em> on hormones</a> <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/54.htm">lied to Allison to cover for Carrie once</a>—maybe that helped tip the scales after <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/57.htm">the hypothesis had been promoted to Allison's attention</a>? How much work is being done by <a href="/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/">the effect where it's easier to pass precisely when transsexualism is rare</a>? Maybe Allison in particular is just (autistically? self-deceptively?) really oblivious? (<a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/255.htm">"I thought I knew what to look for."</a>) Allison and Carrie do <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/175.htm">get</a> <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/177.htm">clocked</a> by restaurant waitstaff, to <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/178.htm">Carrie's discomfort</a> and <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/179.htm">Allison's obliviousness</a>.</p>
<p><em>Closetspace</em> seems to be on life support—there have only been four updates since 2019. (If a blog updated in September, and the previous post had been in May, would you think the author was relentlessly persuing her vision? I didn't think so.) As much as one mourns the tragedy of real life moving faster than the independent creator can tell their story, in a way, it seems—fitting?—in the sense that <em>Closetspace</em> is noticeably a product of <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/articles/99706roo.htm">its time</a>. Someone starting a comic in the current year, about the challenges of being trans in the current year, wouldn't still be speaking in the vocabulary of the '90s. Specifically, no one in the world of <em>Closetspace</em> seems to disagree or be confused about <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">what women are</a>. <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/53.htm">"I'm not really a woman," Heidi confesses to Allison.</a> (Not <em>really</em>? You mean, you're not <em>cis</em>, right?) <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/133.htm">"I haven't been your big brother for over a month," Carrie tells her sister</a> (implying that the <em>act</em> of social transition is what makes Carrie not-a-brother, rather than an underlying identity). For her part, Allison is committed to a life of stealth, disdaining trans people (<a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/254.htm">"I shouldn't be so negative. I just ... have a thing ... about people straddling gender roles"</a>), rather than taking up solidarity as one of them. Even the narrator is in on it <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/132b.htm">(describing Carrie as "male" and Allison as "once male")</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://leasebound.com/"><em>Lease Bound</em></a> is the story of Jaden and Riley, two <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c2p08/">typical</a> lesbians in Adelaide, Australia in the current year who find themselves <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch1p04/">sharing the same apartment after a clerical mix-up</a>. </p>
<p>Jaden works as a bouncer as a female-only nightclub and is surprised one night when three crossdressed men try to enter. When Jaden politely refuses them (<a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c3p09/">"Sorry to disappoint, but this is actually a women's only venue. If you're looking for a great night though, there's a fantastic gay bar just a few blocks from here."</a>), they don't take it well (<a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c3p11/">"We are women, sweetheart. <em>Trans</em> women. Understand now?"</a>), and a scuffle ensues in which <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c4p08/">Jaden gets bruised up</a>.</p>
<p>Jaden, despite having <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c1p08/">gone to college</a> (perhaps, at the University of Under a Rock?), is oblivious as to why the assailants felt entitled to enter the club: <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c4p10/">"What the <em>fuck</em> is a 'trance' woman?"</a> she asks coworkers. <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c4p18/">"Were they part of MadMarch"</a>—<a href="https://exploringsouthaustralia.com.au/reasons-to-visit-adelaide-in-mad-march/">festival season in Adelaide</a>—<a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c4p18/">"or was I seriously supposed to believe they were women?"</a> Her colleagues explain: <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c4p19/">"You know those guys who say they're <em>lesbians trapped in a man's body</em>?" "They're like that, but dead serious."</a></p>
<p>When <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p31/">Riley expresses concern for Jaden's bruises the next morning</a>, Jaden <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p35/">admits that "a few men kicked up a fuss at the club last night."</a> Riley <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p39/">assumes the troublemakers were homophobes protesting lesbianism</a>; Jaden says she <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p40/">doesn't know what they were about</a>, but that they "<a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p41/">called themselves <em>trance, women</em>, or something. I can't really remember.</a> [...] <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p42/">I didn't really get it either. But hey, that's straight men for you, haha!</a>"</p>
<p>Riley, who has not been living under a rock, <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p55/">feels ideologically uncomfortable with Jaden's account</a>—Riley feels morally obligated to be a good ally, but isn't personally zealous enough to correct Jaden's speech. Riley starts to <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch6p59/">worry that her girlfriend Blaire will start a quarrel if transwomen come up in conversation when meeting Jaden</a>. (<em>Transwomen</em> is spelled as one word in Riley's thoughts, but we imagine Blaire is the kind of person insists that it's two.) The meeting goes fine thanks to Jaden's continued obliviousness; <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch8p6/">when Blaire asks Jaden what pronouns she prefers, Jaden (momentarily distracted by Riley nervously dropping a glass) mishears the question and replies, "The way you pronounced it just the was fine."</a> Later, Blaire <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch9p2/">asks Riley if Jaden might be trans</a> <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch9p4/">and not know it</a>, causing Riley to <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch9p6/">grapple with the contradictions of the reigning ideology</a> and <a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch9p8/">muse about her own "gender"</a>.</p>
<p><em>Lease Bound</em> is actively updating. I'm really looking forward to the brewing ideological conflict between Blaire's doctrinal purity and Jaden's normie common sense eventually becoming overt—although the comic mostly isn't focused on politics (<a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/ch9p20/">the author's note on the last page of chapter 9</a> says that next we're going to see more about Jaden's childhood), and that's healthy.</p>
<hr>
<p>There are a lot of obvious and striking parallels betwen these two slice-of-life webcomics about unexpected sexual-minority roommmates keeping secrets from each other—even the titles match (two words, with the first alluding to the roommate-drama setting, Closet/Lease, Space/Bound). They both have an "Everyone is [our sexual minority]" dynamic going. (In <em>Lease Bound</em>, the landladies are also lesbians—<a href="https://leasebound.com/comic/c1p03/">the rainbow panel background when Jaden and Riley find out was a nice touch</a>—and <a href="http://leasebound.com/comic/ch9p7/">the neighbor whose son Jaden helps is gay</a>.) I like both of them, and I think it's sad that the natural fan demographic of each probably mostly hates the other's guts. Gender-critical lesbians aren't going look sympathetically on the protagonists of <em>Closetspace</em>, and trans women aren't going to read <em>Lease Bound</em>, which portrays them as predatory bullies. The conflict is understandable, but the magnitude of it seems ... <em>unnecessary</em>; I think a <em>smarter</em> world would be able to compile all the relevant facts and broker some sort of Pareto-efficient compromise that gets everyone <em>most</em> of what they want.</p>
<p>Carrie has a compelling interest in being able to modify her body and social presentation without being socially punished for it: though humans <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard">can't actually change sex with currently-existing technology</a>, one could at least be permitted to try to approximate it as best one can.</p>
<p>But simultaneously, the proprietors of Yonique have a compelling interest in being able to declare membership criteria for their private club. When the AGP Gang (the out-of-universe <a href="https://lesbihonest-art.tumblr.com/post/653039004954083328/so-im-new-here-and-wanted-to-ask-whowhat-the-agp">canon name for the three troublemakers</a>) stops by, Jaden shouldn't have to <em>pretend not to notice</em> that they're male, and when Jaden explains the club's policy, they should accept it with dignity.</p>
<p>I'm trying to imagine a fanfiction—what if it had been Carrie, Allison, and Heidi? (Who ... have somehow traveled from Texas to Australia—and twenty years into the future? Don't answer that.) I'm imagining that Jaden would only deny entrance to Carrie. (Jaden <a href="/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/">being unaware of trans being a thing should make it easier to Allison and Heidi to pass</a>, but Carrie's <em>not being on HRT</em> is prohibitive.) Carrie would be distressed at being clocked—but not confrontational and entitled like the AGP gang; she would just leave in a panic. Heidi would go after her, but Allison (shocked at Jaden stating what should have been obvious about Carrie, and not wanting the stigma to bleed onto her) goes into the club. And then ... um, Allison and Jaden end up talking somehow?</p>
<p>I don't actually have a direction for this story to go in. I just—wish it were possible for the LGB and the T to be friends without the uniting force of a common enemy. Without trying to set up a false equivalency (<a href="/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/">my analogues who read different books in a different order</a> bear the blunt of the blame for the mess we're in; actual lesbians have a right to be pissed), it <em>shouldn't</em> be rare to read both sides' comics; it <em>shouldn't</em> be normal for <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">political forces to shape neurotype-demographics into <em>sides</em></a>.</p>Amulet2021-05-23T05:00:00-07:002021-05-23T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-05-23:/2021/May/amulet/<p>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 <em>whole bit</em> is specifically about explaining why that frame is delusional. (When …</p><p>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 <em>whole bit</em> is specifically about explaining why that frame is delusional. (When anyone else making the same points would have been dismissed as hateful.)</p>
<p>Is it my nuance, originality, and nonpartisanship? I can play the philosophy-of-language mind games with the best of them—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">better, I think</a>—and am clearly doing <em>more work</em> than just copying the standard appeals to fourth-grade biology from the TERF cache. (And showing your work matters even if postgraduate biology and artificial intelligence eventually conclude that fourth-grade biology basically had the right idea.) If it's the nuance, that bodes well for <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/">continuing to</a> broaden the topic scope of the blog.</p>
<p>But I don't think that's all of it; somehow I doubt whether anti-feminist women and black Republicans have it this easy. (Or even merely non-feminist women and black libertarians, if nonpartisanship is a factor.) Some would say it's my white male privilege—but I have some other ideas.</p>
<p>Maybe people <em>still think they can crack my egg</em>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly">Phyllis Schlafly</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain">Hermain Cain</a>'s eligibility markers for membership in the coalition of the fringes, were immutable—having already left the coalition, there was nothing that could be changed to induce them to come back. Whereas my pre-eligibility status gives me the <em>option</em> to be marked by transitioning—which would change my incentives. If I have to <em>keep</em> <a href="/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/">putting the "cis" in "decision"</a> every day, the coalition can still hope to <a href="/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/">offer me a better deal</a> should my current alignment falter.</p>
<p>Or, as a reader points out, maybe I'm just too <em>weird</em> relative to the current distribution of thought? People already <em>know</em> that unwoke minorities exist, and have ready-made concepts to make sense of their existence (and thereby dismiss their perspectives as unimportant): Hermain Cain is an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom#Epithet">"Uncle Tom"</a>, for example. (Gender-critical feminists have their own form of this: pro-trans liberal-feminist women are <a href="https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/31271/things-handmaidens-say-that-you-find-annoying">"handmaidens"</a>.)</p>
<p>In contrast, my whole "I think I have <a href="/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/">the same underlying psychological condition</a> that results in lesbian and bisexual trans women, but I disagree with the popular account of what the condition is exactly, and have some serious reservations with some of the cultural practices that have recently sprung up around it, while continuing to support morphological freedom more generally" thing isn't something most people have heard before. They don't know what to make of it! Maybe if self-aware TERF-sympathetic-but-also-transhumanist autogynephilic men were more common, there would be some catchy epithet to dismiss us ("us") with. Until then ... I have a lot of writing to do.</p>Interlude XXI2021-05-22T22:27:00-07:002021-05-22T22:27:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-05-22:/2021/May/interlude-xxi/<p>"Obviously I socially gender him as male as per his preference."</p>
<p>"I wouldn't call it a <em>preference</em> exactly—"</p>
<p>"I gender him male as per his philosophical commitments."
<!-- XXX spacing -->
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems2021-05-02T21:25:00-07:002021-05-02T21:25:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-05-02:/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/<blockquote>
<p><em>I'll write my way out<br>
Write everything down, far as I can see<br>
I'll write my way out<br>
Overwhelm them with honesty<br>
This is the eye of the hurricane<br>
This is the only way I can protect my legacy</em></p>
<p>—"Hurricane", <em>Hamilton</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically …</p><blockquote>
<p><em>I'll write my way out<br>
Write everything down, far as I can see<br>
I'll write my way out<br>
Overwhelm them with honesty<br>
This is the eye of the hurricane<br>
This is the only way I can protect my legacy</em></p>
<p>—"Hurricane", <em>Hamilton</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts to promulgate an ideal of <em>systematically correct reasoning</em>—general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans—and, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes">incidentally</a>, to use these methods of systematically correct reasoning to prevent superintelligent machines from <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile">destroying all value in the universe</a>.</p>
<p>Honestly, I've been pretty bitter and jaded about the whole thing lately, to the extent that I've been pejoratively calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase <a href="https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html">due to Dale Carrico</a>) as an expression of contempt—although I should <em>probably</em> cut it out, because that particular choice of pejorative makes it sound like I'm making fun of the superintelligent-machines-destroying-all-value-in-the-universe thing, whereas actually, <em>that</em> part <a href="/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/">still seems right</a>, and the thing I'm bitter about is how almost everyone I <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science">used to trust</a> insisted on, on ...</p>
<p>Well. That's a <em>long story</em>—for another time, perhaps. For <em>now</em>, I want to explain how my robot cult's foundational texts had an enormous influence on my self-concept in relation to sex and gender.</p>
<p>It all started in summer 2007 (I was nineteen years old), when I came across <em>Overcoming Bias</em>, a blog on the theme of how to achieve more accurate beliefs. (I don't remember exactly how I was referred, but I think it was likely to have been <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20071129181942/http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009783.html">a link from Megan McArdle</a>, then writing as "Jane Galt" at <em>Asymmetrical Information</em>.)</p>
<p><a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/hal-finney">Although</a> <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/james-miller">technically</a> <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/david-j-balan">a</a> <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/andrew">group</a> <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/anders-sandberg">blog</a>, the vast majority of posts on <em>Overcoming Bias</em> were by Robin Hanson or Eliezer Yudkowsky. I was previously acquainted in passing with Yudkowsky's <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200217171258/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/tmol-faq.html">writing about future superintelligence</a>. (I had <a href="/ancillary/diary/42/">mentioned him in my Diary once in 2005</a>, albeit without spelling his name correctly.) Yudkowsky was now using <em>Overcoming Bias</em> and the medium of blogging <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vHPrTLnhrgAHA96ko/why-i-m-blooking">to generate material for a future book about rationality</a>. Hanson's posts I could take or leave, but Yudkowsky's sequences of posts about rationality (coming out almost-daily through early 2009, eventually totaling hundreds of thousands of words) were <em>amazingly great</em>, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info">drawing on</a> the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia">established knowledge of fields</a> from <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ftJ38y9SRBCBsCzy/scope-insensitivity">cognitive</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R8cpqD3NA4rZxRdQ4/availability">psychology</a> to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8">evolutionary biology</a> to explain the <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/An-Intuitive-Explanation-Of-Bayess-Theorem">mathematical</a> <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/A-Technical-Explanation-Of-Technical-Explanation">principles</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws">governing</a> <em>how intelligence works</em>—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7ftQ6acRkgo6hqHb/dreams-of-ai-design">the reduction of "thought"</a> to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms"><em>cognitive algorithms</em></a>. Intelligent systems <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy">that use</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence">evidence</a> to construct <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">predictive</a> models of the world around them—that have "true" "beliefs"—can <em>use</em> those models to compute which actions will best achieve their goals. You simply <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DXcezGmnBcAYL2Y2u/yes-a-blog">won't believe how much this blog</a> will change your life; I would later frequently <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ha_ha_only_serious">joke</a> that Yudkowsky rewrote my personality over the internet.</p>
<p>(The blog posts did finally get collected into a book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-AI-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2"><em>Rationality: From AI to Zombies</em></a>, but I continue to say "the Sequences" because I <em>hate</em> the gimmicky "AI to Zombies" subtitle—it makes it sound like a commercial book optimized to sell copies, rather than something to corrupt the youth, competing for the same niche as the Bible or the Koran—<em>the book</em> that explains what your life should be about.)</p>
<p>There are a few things about me that I need to explain before I get into the topic-specific impact the blog had on me.</p>
<p>The first thing—the chronologically first thing. Ever since I was thirteen or fourteen years old—</p>
<p>(and I <em>really</em> didn't expect to be blogging about this nineteen years later)</p>
<p>(I <em>still</em> don't want to be blogging about this, but unfortunately, it actually turns out to be central to the intellectual–political project I've been singlemindedly focused on for the past four and a half years because <a href="https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/">somebody has to and no one else will</a>)</p>
<p>—my <em>favorite</em>—and basically only—masturbation fantasy has always been some variation on me getting magically transformed into a woman. I ... need to write more about the phenomenology of this. In the meantime, just so you know what I'm talking about, the relevant TVTrope is <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman">"Man, I Feel Like a Woman."</a> Or search "body swap" on PornHub. Or check out my few, circumspect contributions to <a href="/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/">the popular genre of</a> captioned-photo female transformation erotica (everyone is wearing clothes, so these might be "safe for work" in a narrow technical sense, if not a moral one): <a href="/ancillary/captions/dr-equality-and-the-great-shift/">1</a> <a href="/ancillary/captions/the-other-side-of-me/">2</a> <a href="/ancillary/captions/the-impossible-box/">3</a> <a href="/ancillary/captions/de-gustibus-non-est/">4</a>.</p>
<p>(The first segment of my pen surname is a legacy of middle-school friends letting me borrow some of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD"><em>Ranma ½</em></a> graphic novels, about a young man named Ranma Saotome cursed ("cursed"??) to transform into a woman on exposure to cold water. This was just <em>before</em> puberty kicked in for me, but I have no way of computing the counterfactual to know whether that had a causal influence.)</p>
<p>So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of at the time, and <em>of course</em> knew that I must never, ever tell a single soul about. (It would have been about three years since the fantasy started that I even worked up the bravery to <a href="/ancillary/diary/53/#first-agp-confession">tell my Diary about it</a>.)</p>
<p><a id="beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity"></a>But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing that would persist indefinitely, where I started having a lot of <em>non</em>-sexual thoughts about being female. Just—little day-to-day thoughts, little symbolic gestures.</p>
<p>Like when I would <a href="/images/crossdreaming_notebook_samples.png">write in my pocket notebook in the persona of my female analogue</a>.</p>
<p>Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders <a href="/images/handwritten_phrase_jazzy_puppy.jpg">(<em>g</em>, <em>j</em>, <em>p</em>, <em>y</em>, <em>z</em>)</a> because I thought it made my handwriting look more feminine.</p>
<p>Or the time when track and field practice split up into boys and girls, and I ironically muttered under my breath, "Why did I even join this team?—boys, I mean."</p>
<p>Or when it was time to order sheets to fit on the dorm beds at the University in Santa Cruz, and I deliberately picked out the pink-with-flowers design on principle.</p>
<p><a id="whipping-girl"></a>Or how I was proud to be the kind of guy who bought Julia Serano's <em>Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity</em> when it was new in 2007, and <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/tradition/">who would rather read from Evelyn Fox Keller's <em>Reflections on Gender and Science</em> than watch Super Bowl XLII</a>.</p>
<p><a id="literary-initials"></a>Or how, at University, I tried to go by my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials">first-and-middle-initials</a> because I wanted a gender-neutral <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline">byline</a>, and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because <em>that would be crazy</em>.</p>
<p>(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J." or "J.T.", which <a href="https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions">feel like a name on account of having a <em>J</em> in them</a>); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; <em>and</em> the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English">high-Scrabble-score letter</a> that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the <em>principle!</em>)</p>
<p>Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)</p>
<p>Or how one of the <a href="/tag/music/">little song-fragments I used to write in my head</a> went—</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Sometimes I sigh because I'll never get rich<br>
And there's no magic so I can't be a witch<br>
And that I must enjoy the scorn of the world<br>
Just 'cause I'm butch and I'm a tranny girl</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or the time I felt proud when my Normal American Girl coworker at the supermarket in 'aught-nine said that she had assumed I was gay. (I'm not, but the fact that Normal American Girl thought so meant that I was successfully unmasculine.)</p>
<p>And so on <em>et cetera ad infinitum</em>. This has been a very persistent <em>thing</em> for me.</p>
<p>The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing doesn't <em>feel</em> explicitly erotic. The thing I did in the day in class about writing in my notebook about being a girl, was <em>very different</em> from the thing I did in my room at night about <em>visualizing</em> girls with this abstract sense of "But what if that were <em>me</em>?" while furiously masturbating. The former activity was my beautiful pure happy romantic daydream, whereas the latter activity was not beautiful or pure at all!</p>
<p>Now I am not a cognitive scientist, and can't claim to <em>know</em> exactly what my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is, or where it comes from—that's <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">not the kind of thing I would expect people to <em>know</em> from introspection alone</a>. But it has always seemed like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been <em>some sort of causal relationship</em> between the erotic thing, and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, even if the two things don't <em>feel</em> the same: the overlap in subject matter is too much to be a coincidence. And the erotic thing definitely came <em>first</em>.</p>
<p>Maybe this story reads differently in 2021 from how it was to live in the 'aughts? I think that teenage boys in the current year having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—</p>
<p>(and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is <em>much</em> easier to talk about than the erotic thing)</p>
<p>(I mean, the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is much harder to talk about <em>clearly</em>, but talking about it <em>un</em>-clearly is less shameful and requires much less bravery)</p>
<p>—are immediately provided with "Oh, that means you're not a cis boy; you're a trans girl" as the definitive explanation.</p>
<p>But it was a different time, then. Of course I had <em>heard of</em> transsexualism as a thing, in the form of the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, but it wasn't something I expected to actually encounter in real life. (I understood my "tranny girl" song to reflect an idle fantasy, not a legitimate life plan.)</p>
<p>At the time, I had <em>no reason to invent the hypothesis</em> that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy <em>because</em> boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word <em>means</em>. I was a boy who had a weird <em>sex fantasy</em> about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It <em>never occured to me</em> to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying <em>with</em> women, not identifying <em>as</em> a woman—<a href="/2017/Jul/interlude-vi/">roughly analogous to how</a> a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow <em>be</em> a cat, because <em>that would be crazy</em>.</p>
<p><a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">It was while browsing <em>Wikipedia</em> in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing</a>—<em>autogynephilia</em>, from the Greek for "<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia">love of</a> <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English">oneself as</a> <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-">a woman</a>." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical sexual psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.</p>
<p><a id="antisexism"></a>You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it <em>psychological-sex-differences denialism</em>, but at the time I called it <em>antisexism</em>. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was <em>bad and wrong</em>. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body). I once <a href="/ancillary/diary/141/#never-do-drag">haughtily told my Diary that "I would never do 'drag,' because that represents a mockery"</a>. (Same rationale as why blackface is offensive.)</p>
<p>So while I was certainly glad to learn that <em>there's a word for it</em>, an obvious and perfect word for <em>my thing</em>, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard theory or the idea that <em>I</em> might somehow be transgender.</p>
<p>So, you know, as part of my antisexism, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique"><em>The Feminine Mystique</em></a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash:_The_Undeclared_War_Against_American_Women">Susan Faludi's <em>Backlash</em></a> from the school library. Before I found my internet-home on <em>Overcoming Bias</em>, I would read the big feminist blogs—<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070630211101/http://pandagon.net/"><em>Pandagon</em></a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080901002058/http://www.feministe.us/blog"><em>Feministe</em></a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20080605182529/http://www.feministing.com/"><em>Feministing</em></a>. The one time I special-ordered a book at the physical Barnes & Noble before I turned 18 and got my own credit card and could order books online, it was <a href="https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html"><em>Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand</em></a>.</p>
<p>(In retrospect, it's notable how <em>intellectualized</em> all of this was—my pro-feminism was an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from any practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends or whatever—I mean, to the extent that I had any friends and not just books.)</p>
<p>It also seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been <em>some sort of causal relationship</em> between my antisexism and the erotic and beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity things. True, the <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#blank-slate">blank slate doctrine</a> has been ideologically fashionable my entire life. In the sense that progressivism has been <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/">likened to a nontheistic state religion</a>—uh, bear with me for a moment—I was a <em>very</em> religious teenager.</p>
<p>I have a vague memory of being in the Crown College library at the University in Santa Cruz in 2007, reading Robert Wright's <em>The Moral Animal</em> (because it had been on <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200118114912/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/bookshelf.html">Yudkowsky's old book-recommendations list</a>), and being <em>aghast</em> at how openly, brazenly <em>sexist</em> it was.</p>
<p>(That is, with respect to what I considered <em>sexist</em> at the time. I wish there was some way to know what my teenage self would think of my current self's writing, which is at least as "bad" as Wright and plausibly worse. Maybe if the whole benevolent-superintelligence thing my robot cult always talks about ever works out, I'll be able to kick off a limited-scope <a href="https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html">ancestor-simulation</a> to find out. In the meantime, if you're offended, I'd love it if you could let me know in the comments exactly how much and why! <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RLScTpwc5W2gGGrL9/identity-isn-t-in-specific-atoms">Personal identity doesn't actually exist</a>; humans growing up in the same cultural tradition can be seen as being drawn from a similar <em>distribution</em> as my teenage self.)</p>
<p>That overwhelming feeling of cold horror and hatred at <em>the enemy revealed</em>—that, I conjecture, is what religious people feel when encountering a heretical text for the first time. (In <em>principle</em>, a sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm that it is the same emotion, as a matter of biological fact.) The social–psychological need to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points">avoid the belief's real weak points</a> is why the "religion" characterization makes sense, even if the claim that psychological sex differences are fake isn't a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural"><em>supernatural</em></a> one. But quasi-religious ideological fervor aside, there was presumably a <em>reason</em> I cared so much about being a good pro-feminist <em>specifically</em>, and hardly spent any time at all thinking about other dimensions of social justice, like race or class. And I think the reason is because, because ...</p>
<p>Well. The reason I'm blogging this story at all is because I'm scared that in order to finish that sentence in the current year and be understood, I'd have to say, "because I was trans." And with respect to what the words mean in the current year, it's true. But that's not how I think of it, then or now.</p>
<p>It's because I was <em>straight</em>. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an <em>identificatory</em> kind of love—loving women as extension of the self, rather than a mysterious, unfathomable <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex#Volume_One">Other</a>. But that's not unusual, is it?—or it <em>shouldn't</em> be. I would have assumed that guys who can't relate to this are probably just sexist.</p>
<hr>
<p>Anyway, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, <em>before</em> I fell in with this robot cult.</p>
<p>My ideological commitment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often at all, but in such a <em>vast</em> body of work as the Sequences, it did happen to come up a few times (and the lessons I learned from those few times are the subject of this blog post).</p>
<p>For example, as part of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions">an early explanation of why the values we would want to program into an artificial superintelligence don't reduce to any one simple principle</a>, Yudkowsky remarks that "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value."</p>
<p>From the perspective of axiomatic antisexism that I held at the time, this assertion is cringe-inducing. Of course most people are straight, but is it not all the <em>same love</em>?</p>
<p>I wasn't ready to hear it then, but—I mean, probably not? So, for the <em>most</em> part, all humans are extremely similar: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind">as Yudkowsky would soon write about</a> <a href="https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/pfc92.pdf">(following Leda Cosmides and John Tooby)</a>, complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis. As a toy example, if some organelle gets assembled from ten genes, those ten alleles <em>all</em> have to be nearly universal in the population—if each only had a frequency of 0.9, then the probability of getting them all right would only be 0.9<sup>10</sup> ≈ 0.349. If allele H <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistasis">epistatically</a> only confers a fitness advantage when allele G at some other locus is already present, then G has to already be well on its way to fixation in order for there to be appreciable selective pressure for H. Evolution, feeding on variation, uses it up. Complicated functionality that requires multiple genes working in concert <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZyNak8F6WXjuEbWWc/the-wonder-of-evolution">can only accrete gradually</a> as each individual piece reaches fixation in the entire population, resulting in an intricate species-universal <em>design</em>: just about everyone has 206 bones, two lungs, a liver, a visual cortex, <em>&c</em>.</p>
<p>In this way (contrary to the uninformed suspicions of those still faithful to the blank slate), evolutionary psychology actually turns out to be impressively antiracist discipline: maybe individual humans can differ in small ways like personality, or <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#ancestries">ancestry-groups in small ways</a> like skin color, but these are, and <em>have</em> to be, "shallow" low-complexity variations on the same basic human design; new <em>complex</em> functionality would require speciation.</p>
<p>This luck does not extend to antisexism. If the genome were a computer program, it would have <code>if female { /* ... */ } else if male { /* ... */ }</code> conditional blocks, and inside those blocks, you can have complex sex-specific functionality. By default, selection pressures on one sex tend to drag the other along for the ride—men have nipples because there's no particular reason for them not to—but in those cases where it was advantageous in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for females and males to do things <em>differently</em>, sexual dimorphism can evolve (slowly—<a href="/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf">more than one and half orders of magnitude slower than monomorphic adaptations</a>, in fact).</p>
<p>The evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers wrote, "One can, in effect, treat the sexes as if they were different species, the opposite sex being a resource relevant to producing maximum surviving offspring" (!). There actually isn't one species-universal design—it's <em>two</em> designs.</p>
<p>If you're willing to admit to the possibility of psychological sex differences <em>at all</em>, you have to admit that sex differences in the parts of the mind that are <em>specifically about mating</em> are going to be a prime candidate. (But by no means the only one—different means of reproduction have different implications for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory">life-history strategies</a> far beyond the act of mating itself.) Even if there's a lot of "shared code" in how love-and-attachment works in general, there are also going to be specific differences that were <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vpf46nLMDYPC6wA4/optimization-and-the-intelligence-explosion">optimized for</a> facilitating males impregnating females. In that sense, the claim that "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other" just seems commonsensically <em>true</em>.</p>
<p>I guess if you <em>didn't</em> grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this whole theoretical line of argument about evolutionary psychology doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you <em>have</em> built your identity around <a href="/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/">quasi-religious <em>denial</em></a> of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief">knows that they know</a>), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9">can be a pretty rough experience</a>.</p>
<p><a id="hair-trigger-antisexism"></a>My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to <em>most</em> posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (<em>i.e.</em>, sexist), rather than trying to maximize the accuracy of my probabilistic predictions.</p>
<p>Another one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head a few years earlier (which I mention for its being representative of my attitude at the time, rather than it being notable in itself), concerned an advice columnist, <a href="http://www.advicegoddess.com/">Amy Alkon</a>, syndicated in the <em>Contra Costa Times</em> of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences—the usual fare about women seeking commitment and men seeking youth and beauty. My song went—</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight<br>
So she can't give her bad advice<br>
No love or value save for evolutionary psych</em> </p>
<p><em>I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight<br>
Because the world's not girls and guys<br>
Cave men and women fucking 'round the fire in the night</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Looking back with the outlook later acquired from my robot cult, this is <em>abhorrent</em>. You don't <em>casually wish death</em> on someone just because you disagree with their views on psychology! (Also, casually wishing death on a woman for her views does not seem particularly pro-feminist?!) Even if it wasn't in a spirit of personal malice (this was a song I sung to myself, not an actual threat directed to Amy Alkon's inbox), the sentiment just <em>isn't done</em>. But at the time, I <em>didn't notice there was anything wrong with my song</em>. I hadn't yet been socialized into the refined ethos of "False ideas should be argued with, but heed that we too may have ideas that are false".</p>
<p>In the same vein of my not then understanding the difference between argument and demonizing the outgroup, there was one especially memorable occasion in the <em>Overcoming Bias</em> comment section when <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267438">the soon-to-be President of Yudkowsky's research nonprofit brought up the idea of banning me</a> after <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267387">I said</a>, "are you aware that this is exactly the sort of psychology that leads to rape?" in response to <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267368">another commenter's anecdote</a> that I construed as misogynistic. Coincidentally, this was actually the <em>same</em> day as my first time ever crossdressing in front of other people (I having purchased a purple dress on Amazon and invited two friends over while my parents were away), only I couldn't enjoy it at all because I was so emotionally trashed from the ban threat.</p>
<p>Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-theory-sequence">"Fun Theory"</a>—speculations on how life could be truly <em>good</em> if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god">in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces</a>.</p>
<p>According to Yudkowsky, one of the ways in which people's thinking about artificial intelligence usually goes wrong is <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZeZt8cPk48xxiQ8/anthropomorphic-optimism">anthropomorphism</a>—expecting arbitrary AIs to behave like humans, when really "AI" corresponds to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnWRXkcDi5Tw9rzXw/the-design-space-of-minds-in-general">a much larger space of algorithms</a>. As a social animal, predicting other humans is one of the things we've evolved to be good at, and the way that works is probably via "empathic inference": <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits">I predict your behavior by imagining what <em>I</em> would do in your situation</a>. Since all humans are very similar, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism">this appeal-to-black-box</a> works pretty well in our lives (though it won't work on AI). And from this empathy, evolution also coughed up the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGvyqAQw6yqTjpKf4/the-gift-we-give-to-tomorrow">moral miracle</a> of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds"><em>sympathy</em>, intrinsically caring about what others feel</a>.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement">"Interpersonal Entanglement"</a>, Yudkowsky appeals to the complex moral value of sympathy as an argument against the desirability of nonsentient sex partners (<em>catgirls</em> being the technical term). Being emotionally intertwined with another actual person is one of the things that makes life valuable, that would be lost if people just had their needs met by soulless catgirl holodeck characters.</p>
<p>But there's a problem, Yudkowsky argues: women and men aren't designed to make each other optimally happy. If I may put a pseudo-mathy poetic gloss on it: the abstract game between the two human life-history strategies in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness had a conflicting-interests as well as a shared-interests component, and human psychology still bears the design signature of that game denominated in inclusive fitness, even though <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation-executers-not-fitness-maximizers">no one cares about inclusive fitness</a>. (Peter Watts: <a href="https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm">"And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete."</a>) The scenario of Total Victory for the ♂ player in the conflicting-interests subgame is not <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium">Nash</a>. The design of the entity who <em>optimally</em> satisfied what men want out of women would not be, and <em>could</em> not be, within the design parameters of actual women.</p>
<p>(And <em>vice versa</em> and respectively, but in case you didn't notice, this blog post is all about male needs.)</p>
<p>Yudkowsky dramatized the implications in a short story, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2">"Failed Utopia #4-2"</a>, portraying an almost-<a href="https://arbital.com/p/ai_alignment/">aligned</a> superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because of the mismatch in the sexes' desires, and because the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution (according to the story) turns out to be splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own <em>separate</em> utopias (on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_symbol#Origins">Venus and Mars</a>, ha ha), complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.</p>
<p>Of course no one <em>wants</em> that—our male protagonist doesn't <em>want</em> to abandon his wife and daughter for some catgirl-adjacent (if conscious) hussy. But humans <em>do</em> adapt to loss; if the separation were already accomplished by force, people would eventually move on, and post-separation life with companions superintelligently optimized <em>for you</em> would (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguendo"><em>arguendo</em></a>) be happier than life with your real friends and family, whose goals will sometimes come into conflict with yours because they weren't superintelligently designed <em>for you</em>.</p>
<p>The alignment-theory morals are those of <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/unforeseen_maximum">unforeseen maxima</a> and <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/edge_instantiation">edge instantiation</a>. An AI designed to maximize happiness would kill all humans and tile the galaxy with maximally-efficient happiness-brainware. If this sounds "crazy" to you, that's the problem with anthropomorphism I was telling you about: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zrGzan92SxP27LWP9/points-of-departure">don't imagine "AI" as an emotionally-repressed human</a>, just think about <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20071013171416/http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/06/11/the-stamp-collecting-device/">a machine that calculates what actions would result in what outcomes</a>, and does the action that would result in the outcome that maximizes some function. It turns out that picking a function that doesn't kill everyone looks hard. Just tacking on the constraints that you can think of (like making the <em>existing</em> humans happy without tampering with their minds) <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked">will tend to produce similar "crazy" outcomes that you didn't think to exclude</a>.</p>
<p>At the time, <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb">I expressed horror</a> at "Failed Utopia #4-2" in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back a dozen years later—<a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/D34jhYBcaoE7DEb8d">or even four years later</a>—my performative horror was missing the point.</p>
<p><em>The argument makes sense</em>. Of course, it's important to notice that you'd need an additional <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave">handwave</a> to explain why the AI in the story doesn't give every <em>individual</em> their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other. A faithful antisexist (as I was) might insist that that should be the <em>only</em> moral, as it implies the other <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_a_fortiori"><em>a fortiori</em></a>. But if you're trying to <em>learn about reality</em> rather than protect your fixed quasi-religious beliefs, it should be <em>okay</em> for one of the lessons to get a punchy sci-fi short story; it should be <em>okay</em> to think about the hyperplane between two coarse clusters, even while it's simultaneously true that you could build a wall around every individual point, without deigning to acknowledge the existence of clusters.</p>
<p>On my reading of the text, it is <em>significant</em> that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the <em>verthandi</em> (presumably after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver%C3%B0andi">the Norse deity that determines men's fates</a>), rather than just being referred to as women. The <em>verthandi</em> may <em>look like</em> women, they may be <em>approximately</em> psychologically human, but since the <em>detailed</em> psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, judicious exercise of the <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/">tenth virtue of precision</a> demands that a <em>different word</em> be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person. Calling the <em>verthandi</em> "women" would be <em>worse writing</em>; it would <em>fail to communicate</em> the impact of what has taken place in the story.</p>
<p>Another post in this vein that had a huge impact on me was <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">"Changing Emotions"</a>. As an illustration of how <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard">the hope for radical human enhancement is fraught with</a> technical difficulties, Yudkowsky sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.</p>
<p>It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on <a href="/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link">this</a> <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link">blog</a> <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link">five</a> <a href="/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link">different</a> <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link">times</a>. In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the <a href="https://archive.is/En6qW">2004 Extropians mailing list post</a> that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"</p>
<p><a id="changing-sex-is-hard"></a>The argument goes: it might be easy to <em>imagine</em> changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play">plug-and-play</a> architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything Just Work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex. And even that's not <em>really</em> a sex change, as far as the whole integrated system is concerned—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Remapping the connections from the remapped somatic areas to the pleasure center will ... give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less. That doesn't make you a woman. You'd still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>So to actually <em>become female</em> ...</p>
<p>We're talking about a <em>massive</em> transformation here, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses rearranged. Not just form, but content—just like a male judo expert would need skills repatterned to become a female judo expert, so too, you know how to operate a male brain but not a female brain. You are the equivalent of a judo expert at one, but not the other. You have <em>cognitive</em> reflexes, and consciously learned cognitive skills as well.</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you <em>empathize</em> with your <em>past self</em> of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life's memories distant and alien things? How can you <em>remember</em>, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But, well ... I mean, um ...</p>
<p>(I still really don't want to be blogging about this, but <em>somebody has to and no one else will</em>)</p>
<p>From the standpoint of my secret erotic fantasy, "normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing" is actually a <em>great</em> outcome—the <em>ideal</em> outcome. Let me explain.</p>
<p><a id="secret-fantasy-frame-stories"></a>The main plot of my secret erotic fantasy accommodates many frame stories, but I tend to prefer those that invoke the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire">literary genre of science</a>, and posit "technology" rather than "spells" or "potions" as the agent of transformation, even if it's all ultimately magic (where <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity">"magic" is a term of art for anything you don't understand how to implement as a computer program</a>).</p>
<p>So imagine having something like <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter">the transporter in <em>Star Trek</em></a>, but you re-materialize with the body of someone else, rather than your original body—a little booth I could walk in, dissolve in a tingly glowy special effect for a few seconds, and walk out looking like (say) <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kay_Eaton?file=Kay_Eaton.jpg">Nana Visitor (circa 1998)</a>. (In the folklore of <a href="/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/">female-transformation erotica</a>, this machine is often called the <a href="https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_115321.html">"morphic adaptation unit"</a>.)</p>
<p>As "Changing Emotions" points out, this high-level description of a hypothetical fantasy technology leaves many details unspecified—not just the <em>how</em>, but the <em>what</em>. What would the indistinguishable-from-magical transformation booth do to my brain? <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DdEKcS6JcW7ordZqQ/not-taking-over-the-world">As a preference-revealing thought experiment</a>, what would I <em>want</em> it to do, if I can't change <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism">the basic nature of reality</a>, but if engineering practicalities weren't a constraint? (That is, I'm allowed to posit any atom-configuration without having to worry about how you would get all the atoms in the right place, but I'm not allowed to posit tethering my immortal soul to a new body, because <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural">souls</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Au7kvRAPREm3ADcK/psychic-powers">aren't</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies">real</a>.)</p>
<p>The anti-plug-and-play argument makes me confident that it would have to change <em>something</em> about my mind in order to integrate it with a new female body—if nothing else, my unmodified brain doesn't physically <em>fit</em> inside Nana Visitor's skull. (<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/">One meta-analysis puts the sex difference in intracranial volume and brain volume at</a> a gaping <a href="/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> ≈ 3.0 and 2.1, respectively, and Visitor doesn't look like she has an unusually large head.)</p>
<p>Fine—we're assuming that difficulty away and stipulating that the magical transformation booth can make the <em>minimal</em> changes necessary to put my brain in a female body, and have it fit, and have all the motor-connection/body-mapping stuff line up so that I can move and talk normally in a body that feels like mine, without being paralyzed or needing months of physical therapy to re-learn how to walk.</p>
<p>I want this more than I can say. But is that <em>all</em> I want? What about all the <em>other</em> sex differences in the brain? Male brains are more lateralized—doing <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/823">relatively more communication within hemispheres rather than between</a>; there are language tasks that women and men perform equally well on, but <a href="/papers/shaywitz-et_al-sex_differences_in_the_functional_organization_of_the_brain_for_language.pdf">men's brains use only the <em>left</em> inferior frontal gyrus, whereas women's use both</a>. Women have a relatively thicker corpus callosum; men have a relatively larger amygdala. Fetal testosterone levels <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3306238/">increase the amount of gray matter in posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, but decrease the gray matter in Wernicke's area</a> ...</p>
<p>Do I want the magical transformation technology to fix all that, too?</p>
<p>Do I have <em>any idea</em> what it would even <em>mean</em> to fix all that, without spending multiple lifetimes studying neuroscience?</p>
<p>I think I have just enough language to <em>start</em> to talk about what it would mean. Since sex isn't an atomic attribute, but rather a high-level statistical regularity such that almost everyone can be cleanly classified as "female" or "male" <em>in terms of</em> lower-level traits (genitals, hormone levels, <em>&c.</em>), then, abstractly, we're trying to take points from male distribution and map them onto the female distribution in a way that preserves as much structure (personal identity) as possible. My female analogue doesn't have a penis like me (because then she wouldn't be female), but she is going to speak American English like me and be <a href="/images/ancestry_report.png">85% Ashkenazi like me</a>, because language and autosomal genes don't have anything to do with sex.</p>
<p>The hard part has to do with traits that are meaningfully sexually dimorphic, but not as a discrete dichotomy—where the sex-specific universal designs differ in ways that are <em>subtler</em> than the presence or absence of entire reproductive organs. (Yes, I know about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology)">homology</a>—and <em>you</em> know what I meant.) We are <em>not</em> satisfied if the magical transformation technology swaps out my penis and testicles for a functioning female reproductive system without changing the rest of my body, because we want the end result to be indistinguishable from having been drawn from the female distribution (at least, indistinguishable <em>modulo</em> having my memories of life as a male before the magical transformation), and a man-who-somehow-magically-has-a-vagina doesn't qualify.</p>
<p>The "obvious" way to to do the mapping is to keep the same percentile rank within each trait (given some suitably exhaustive parsing and factorization of the human design into individual "traits"), but take it with respect to the target sex's distribution. I'm 5′11″ tall, which <a href="https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-women/">puts me at</a> the 73rd percentile for American men, about 6/10ths of a standard deviation above the mean. So <em>presumably</em> we want to say that my female analogue is at the 73rd percentile for American women, about 5′5½″.</p>
<p>You might think this is "unfair": some women—about 7 per 1000—are 5′11″, and we don't want to say they're somehow <em>less female</em> on that account, so why can't I keep my height? The problem is that if we refuse to adjust for every trait for which the female and male distributions overlap (on the grounds that <em>some</em> women have the same trait value as my male self), we don't end up with a result from the female distribution.</p>
<p><a id="typical-point"></a>The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is <em>not</em> typical along each dimension individually. <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/">In 100 flips of a biased coin</a> that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the <em>single</em> most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're <em>vanishingly</em> unlikely to actually see it. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_equipartition_property">sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads</a>. Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, <a href="https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/">most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode</a>, for the same reason. (The <em>same</em> reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large <em>n</em>.)</p>
<p>Statistical sex differences are like flipping two different collections of coins with different biases, where the coins represent various traits. Learning the outcome of any individual flip, doesn't tell you which set that coin came from, but <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1">if we look at the aggregation of many flips, we can get <em>godlike</em> confidence</a> as to which collection we're looking at.</p>
<p>A single-variable measurement like height is like a single coin: unless the coin is <em>very</em> biased, one flip can't tell you much about the bias. But there are lots of things about people for which it's not that they can't be measured, but that the measurements require <em>more than one number</em>—which correspondingly offer more information about the distribution generating them.</p>
<p><a id="chromosomes"></a>And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't <em>know</em> what chromosomes they have. (Um, with respect to some sense of the word "know" that doesn't care how unsurprised I was that my <a href="http://23andme.com/">23andMe</a> results came back with a <em>Y</em> and that I would have happily bet on this at extremely generous odds.)</p>
<p>Certainly, I agree that almost no one interacts with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes <em>existed</em> before 1905. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens">(Co-discovered by a woman!)</a> But the function of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions">intensional definitions</a> in human natural language isn't to exhaustively <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing">pinpoint</a> a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AI's executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters">Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"</a> seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">"The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."</a> But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor">SRY gene</a> located on the Y chromosome, <em>are</em> such a common cause—the root of the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models">causal graph</a> underlying all <em>other</em> sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living <em>before</em> 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been <em>right</em>. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty <em>well-performing</em> definition—if you're looking for a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests"><em>simple</em> membership test</a> that's entangled with a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.</p>
<p>Take faces. People are <a href="/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf">verifiably very good at recognizing sex from (hair covered, males clean-shaven) photographs of people's faces</a> (96% accuracy, which is the equivalent of <em>d</em> ≈ 3.5), but we don't have direct introspective access into what <em>specific</em> features our brains are using to do it; we just look, and <em>somehow</em> know. The differences are real <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1351#d3e949">(a computer statistical model gets up to 99.47% accuracy)</a>, but it's not a matter of any single, simple measurement you could perform with a ruler (like the distance between someone's eyes). Rather, it's a high-dimensional <em>pattern</em> in many such measurements you could take with a ruler, no one of which is definitive. <a href="/papers/roberts-bruce-feature_saliency_in_judging_the_sex_and_familiarity_of_faces.pdf">Covering up the nose makes people slower and slightly worse at sexing faces, but people don't do better than chance at guessing sex from photos of noses alone</a>.</p>
<p>Notably, for <em>images</em> of faces, we actually <em>do</em> have transformation technology! (Not "magical", because we know how it works.) AI techniques like <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948">generative adversarial networks</a> and <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-with-autoencoders-77fd3a8dd368">autoencoders</a> can learn the structure of the distribution of facial photographs, and use that knowledge to synthesize faces from scratch (as demonstrated by <a href="https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/"><em>thispersondoesnotexist.com</em></a>)—or <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10786">do things like</a> sex transformation (as demonstrated by <a href="https://www.faceapp.com/">FaceApp</a>, the <em>uniquely best piece of software in the world</em>).</p>
<p>If you let each pixel vary independently, the space of possible 1024x1024 images is 1,048,576-dimensional, but the vast hypermajority of those images aren't photorealistic human faces. Letting each pixel vary independently is the wrong way to think about it: changing the lighting or pose changes a lot of pixels in what humans would regard as images of "the same" face. So instead, our machine-learning algorithms learn a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ex63DPisEjomutkCw/msg-len">compressed</a> representation of what makes the tiny subspace (relative to images-in-general) of faces-in-particular similar to each other. That <a href="https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-latent-space-in-machine-learning-de5a7c687d8d">latent space</a> is a lot smaller (say, 512 dimensions), but still rich enough to embed the high-level distinctions that humans notice: <a href="https://youtu.be/dCKbRCUyop8?t=1433">you can find a hyperplane that separates</a> smiling from non-smiling faces, or glasses from no-glasses, or young from old, or different races—or female and male. Sliding along the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_(geometry)">normal vector</a> to that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperplane">hyperplane</a> gives the desired transformation: producing images that are "more female" (as the model has learned that concept) while keeping "everything else" the same.</p>
<p>Two-dimensional <em>images</em> of people are <em>vastly</em> simpler than the actual people themselves in the real physical universe. But <em>in theory</em>, a lot of the same <em>mathematical principles</em> would apply to hypothetical future nanotechnology-wielding AI systems that could, like the AI in "Failed Utopia #4-2", synthesize a human being from scratch (this-person-<em>didn't</em>-exist-dot-com?), or do a real-world sex transformation (PersonApp?)—and the same statistical morals apply to reasoning about sex differences in psychology and (which is to say) the brain.</p>
<p>Daphna Joel <em>et al.</em> <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468">argue</a> <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468">that</a> human brains are "unique 'mosaics' of features" that cannot be categorized into distinct <em>female</em> and <em>male</em> classes, because it's rare for brains to be "internally consistent"—female-typical or male-typical along <em>every</em> dimension. It's true and important that brains aren't <em>discretely</em> sexually dimorphic the way genitals are, but as <a href="http://cogprints.org/10046/1/Delgiudice_etal_critique_joel_2015.pdf">Marco del Giudice <em>et al.</em> point out</a>, the "cannot be categorized into two distinct classes" claim seems false in an important sense. The lack of "internal consistency" in Joel <em>et al.</em>'s sense is exactly the behavior we expect from multivariate normal-ish distributions with different-but-not-vastly-different means. (There aren't going to be many traits where the sexes are like, <em>four</em> or whatever standard deviations apart.) It's just like how sequences of flips of a Heads-biased and Tails-biased coin are going to be unique "mosaics" of Heads and Tails, but pretty distinguishable with enough flips—and indeed, with the right stats methodology, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/">MRI brain scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy</a>.</p>
<p>Sex differences in the brain are like sex differences in the skeleton: anthropologists can tell female and male skeletons apart (the <a href="https://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/sexual-dimorphism-pelvis">pelvis is shaped differently</a>, for obvious reasons), and <a href="/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf">machine-learning models can see very reliable differences that human radiologists can't</a>, but neither sex has entire <em>bones</em> that the other doesn't, and the same is true of brain regions. (The evopsych story about complex adaptations being universal-up-to-sex suggests that sex-specific bones or brain regions should be <em>possible</em>, but in a bit of <em>relative</em> good news for antisexism, apparently evolution didn't need to go that far. Um, in humans—a lot of other mammals actually have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum">a penis bone</a>.)</p>
<p>Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which my mosaic is more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm <em>sure</em> I'm above the female mean in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits">Big Five Neuroticism</a>.) <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences">"[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."</a></p>
<p>But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples"><em>nonapples</em> are a less cohesive category than <em>apples</em></a>: a woman trapped in a man's body would be weird, but it doesn't follow that weird men are secretly women, as opposed to some other, <em>specific</em>, kind of weird. If you <em>sum over</em> all of my traits, everything that makes me, <em>me</em>—it's going to be a point in the <em>male</em> region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In the course of <em>being myself</em>, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not because I'm <em>trying</em> to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't—or I wouldn't, if I still believed that preference was coherent), and whether or not I <em>notice</em> all the little details that implies (I almost certainly don't).</p>
<p>Okay, maybe I'm <em>not</em> completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would <em>prefer</em> to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? (Well, maybe two or three.) When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look at the core of old-timers from the <em>Overcoming Bias</em> days, rather than the greater "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, <a href="/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/">most of the <em>women</em></a> in <a href="/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/">my open-source programming scene</a> are male. Am ... am I not supposed to <em>notice</em>?</p>
<p>Is <em>everyone else</em> not supposed to notice? Suppose I got the magical body transformation (with no brain mods beyond the minimum needed for motor control). Suppose I caught the worshipful attention of a young man just like I used to be ("a" young man, as if there wouldn't be <em>dozens</em>), who privately told me, "I've never met a woman quite like you." What would I be supposed to tell him? <a href="https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/purpleandskates/">"There's a <em>reason</em> for that"</a>?</p>
<p>In the comments to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/">a post about how gender is built on innate sex differences</a> (of which I can only link to the Internet Archive copy, the original having been quietly deleted sometime in 2013—I wonder why!), Yudkowsky opined that "until men start thinking of themselves <em>as men</em> they will tend to regard women as defective humans."</p>
<p>From context, it seems like the idea was targeted at men who disdain women as a mysterious Other—but the same moral applies to men who are in ideologically-motivated denial about how male-typical they are, and whether this has implications. <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#comment-7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b">At the time, I certainly didn't want to think of myself <em>as a man</em>.</a> And yet ...</p>
<p>For example. When I read things from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory">systematizing–empathizing</a>/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear that you know that I know, is <a href="/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf">only a mere statistical difference at a mere Cohen's <em>d</em> ≈ 0.93</a>, not an absolute like genitals or chromosomes—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but, that's not <em>fair</em>. People <em>are</em> systems, because <em>everything</em> is a system. <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway">What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?</a>"</p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent">But the map is not the territory</a>. We don't have unmediated access to reality beyond <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20020606121040/http://singinst.org/GISAI/mind/consensus.html">the Veil of Maya</a>; system-ness in the empathizing/systematizing sense is a feature of our <em>models</em> of the world, not the world itself.</p>
<p>So what "Everything is a system" <em>means</em> is, "I <em>think</em> everything is a system."</p>
<p>I think everything is a system ... because I'm male??</p>
<p>(Or whatever the appropriate generalization of "because" is for statistical group differences. The sentence "I'm 5′11″ because I'm male" doesn't seem quite right, but it's pointing to something real.)</p>
<p>I could <em>assert</em> that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that <em>some</em> of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">are coordination equilibria</a>.) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the <em>specific</em> things I do even though I'm <a href="/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg">objectively not that smart</a> compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality">"It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a <em>higher cognitive temperature</em>, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."</a>)</p>
<p>Of course there are women with an analogous story to tell about the nature of their own uniqueness—analogous along <em>some</em> dimensions, if not others—but those aren't <em>my</em> story to tell.</p>
<p>I can <em>imagine</em> that all the gaps will vanish after the revolution. I can imagine it, but I can no longer <em>assert it with a straight face</em> because <em>I've read the literature</em> and can tell you several observations about chimps and <a href="/images/cah_diffs_table.png">congenital adrenal hyperplasia</a> that make that seem <em>relatively unlikely</em>.</p>
<p>I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fanatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."</p>
<p>I said, "I like characters and stories! I think."</p>
<p>He said, "I know, but at the margin, you seem suboptimally far in the challenges and points direction. But that's fine; that's what women are for."</p>
<p>And what evidence could I point to, to show him that he's <em>bad and wrong</em> for saying that, if he's not already religiously required to believe it?</p>
<p><em>Alright</em>. So <em>in principle</em>, you could imagine having a PersonApp that maps me to a point in the female region of configuration space in some appropriately structure-preserving way, to compute my female analogue who is as authentically <em>me</em> as possible while also being authentically female, down to her pelvis shape, and the proportion of gray matter in her posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and—the love of a woman for a man. What is she like, concretely? Do I know how to imagine that?</p>
<p>Or if I can imagine it, can I <em>describe</em> it in this blog post? I am presently sorrowful that <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/S8ysxzgraSeuBXnpk/rationality-quotes-july-2009/comment/DtyDzN5etD4woXtFM">(following John Holt)</a> we all know more than we can say. I have mental models of people, and the models get queried for predictions in the course of planning my social behavior, but I don't have introspective access to the differences between models. It's easier to imagine people in hypothetical situations and say things like, "That doesn't sound like something she'd <em>do</em>, but <em>he</em> would" (and be correct), than to say exactly what it is about her character and his that generated these predictions, such that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles">my words would paint a picture in your head</a> that would let you make your own predictions about her and him without having met them—just like how you're better at recognizing someone's face, than at describing their face in words in enough detail for an artist to draw a portrait.</p>
<p>As a <em>first-order approximation</em>, I do have a sister. I think the family resemblance between us is stronger than with either parent. We're about equally intelligent—OK, she's probably smarter than me; <a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf">the SAT is pretty</a> <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid"><em>g</em>-loaded</a> and her 1580 (out of 1600) trounces my 2180 (on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#2005_changes,_including_a_new_2400-point_score">the out-of-2400 scale used between 2005 and 2016</a>, such that 2180 proportionally scales down to 1453 out of 1600). Our dark hair curls into helices with similar radius. We even have similar mannerisms, I think? She's 5′6½″.</p>
<p>But in a lot of ways that matter, we are <em>very</em> different people. When you compare resumés and representative work-samples of what we've <em>done</em> with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my dropout–autodidact's passion culminating in this <em>batshit insane</em> secret ("secret") blog about the philosophy of language and the etiology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males—it ... paints a different picture.</p>
<p>Of course same-sex siblings would <em>also</em> be different pictures. (Identical twins aren't <em>duplicates</em> of each other, either.) But the advantage of having a sister is that it gives my brain's pattern-matching faculties a target to sight against. As a <em>second</em>-order approximation, my female analogue is close to being somewhere on the vector in personspace between me and my sister (but not exactly on that line, because the line spans both the difference-between-siblings and the difference-between-sexes).</p>
<p>(All this is in accordance with <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">"Everything is a vector space" philosophy</a> implied by this blog's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain">TLD</a>—if it turns out that something <em>isn't</em> a vector space, I'm not sure I want to know about it. I can hope that my description of the <em>methodology</em> is valuable, even if your brain's pattern-matching faculties can't follow along with the same example, because you haven't met my sister and only know the aspects of me that shine through to the blog.)</p>
<p>Okay. Having supplied just enough language to <em>start</em> to talk about what it would even mean to actually become female—is that what I <em>want</em>?</p>
<p>I've just explained that, <em>in principle</em>, it could be done, so you might think there's no <em>conceptual</em> problem with the idea of changing sex, in the same sense that there's nothing <em>conceptually</em> wrong with Jules Verne's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon">pair</a> of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon">novels</a> about flying around the moon. There are lots of technical rocket-science details that Verne didn't and couldn't have known about in the 1860s, but the <em>basic idea</em> was sound, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8">actually achieved a hundred years later</a>. So why is it in any way <em>relevant</em> that making the magical transformation fantasy real would be technically complicated?</p>
<p>It's relevant insofar as the technical details change your evaluation of the desirability of <em>what</em> is to be accomplished, which can differ from <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pK4HTxuv6mftHXWC3/prolegomena-to-a-theory-of-fun">what sounds like good news in the moment of first hearing about the idea</a>.</p>
<p>So, I mean, if it's reversible, I would definitely be extremely eager to <em>try</em> it ...</p>
<p>I had said we're assuming away engineering difficulties in order to make the thought experiment more informative about pure preferences, but let's add one constraint to <em>force</em> the thought experiment to be informative about preferences, and not allow the wishy-washy evasion of "I'm eager to <em>try</em> it."</p>
<p>What if I can't just "try" it? What if the machine can only be used once? Or (my preference) if some deep "brain sex" transformation only works once, even if a more superficial motor remapping is easy to do or re-do? Come up with whatever frame story you want for this: maybe the machine costs my life savings just to rent for two minutes, or maybe the transformation process is ever-so-slightly imperfect, such that you can't re-transform someone who's already been transformed once, like a photocopy being a perfectly acceptable substitute for an original document, but photocopies-of-photocopies rapidly losing quality.</p>
<p><a id="if-i-have-to-choose"></a>In that case, if I have to choose ... I <em>don't</em> think I want to be Actually Female? I <em>like</em> who I am on the inside, and don't need to change it. I don't <em>want</em> to stop loving challenges and points—or women!—in the way that I do. And if I don't know enough neuroscience to have an <em>informed</em> preference about the ratio of gray to white matter in my posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, I'm sure it's <em>probably fine</em>.</p>
<p>At the same time, the idea of having a female body still seems like <em>the most appealing thing in the world</em>. If artificial superintelligence gives me BodyApp to play with for a subjective year and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer">tiles the <em>rest</em> of our future lightcone with paperclips</a>, that's <em>fine</em>; I will die <em>happy</em>.</p>
<p>So, I guess ...</p>
<p>If I'm being <em>really</em> honest with myself here ...</p>
<p>And I successfully make-believe that I can tell the truth with no consequences on my secret ("secret") blog even though at this point my paper-thin pseudonymity is more like a genre convention or a running joke rather than providing any real privacy ...</p>
<p>I guess I <em>want</em> to be "a normal [...] man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing."</p>
<p>Is that weird? Is that wrong?</p>
<p>Okay, yes, it's <em>obviously</em> weird and wrong, but should I care more about not being weird and wrong, than I do about my deepest most heartfelt desire that I've thought about every day for the last nineteen years?</p>
<p>This is probably counterintuitive if you haven't been living with it your entire adult life? People have <em>heard of</em> the "born in the wrong body" narrative, which makes intuitive sense: if female souls are designed to work female bodies, and you're a female soul tethered to a male body, you can imagine the soul finding the mismatch distressing and wanting to fix it. But if, as I'm positing for my case, there <em>is no mismatch</em> in any objective sense, then where does the desire come from? How do you make sense of wanting to change physiological sex, for reasons that <em>don't</em> have anything to do with already neurologically resembling that sex? What's really going on there, psychologically?</p>
<p>Part of what makes this so hard to talk about <em>besides</em> it being weird and wrong, is that we don't really understand how our own minds work in a legible way; we just experience things. Even if you're <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYjyQ839MDsZ6E3L/seeing-red-dissolving-mary-s-room-and-qualia">not sure that other people really see "the same" colors as you</a> (and you don't know how to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rQEwySCcLtdKHkrHp/righting-a-wrong-question">reformulate the question</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question">to not</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-questions">be confused</a>), you can at least <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution">agree on color <em>words</em></a> by pointing to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone#Pantone_Color_Matching_System">Pantone swatches</a>, but I'm not sure I have the language to convey the facts about the qualia I associate with the word <em>autogynephilia</em> to someone who doesn't already feel something similar.</p>
<p>But I have to try. A clue: when I'm ... uh. When I'm—well, you know ...</p>
<p>(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this.)</p>
<p>A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very <em>good</em> at first-person visualization? The <em>content</em> of the fantasy is about <em>me</em> being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be <em>me</em>. Wanting <em>my</em> body to be shaped like <em>that</em>, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even necessarily to <em>do</em> anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.</p>
<p>If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a full-length mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a <em>lot</em> more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror. My face ruins it and makeup doesn't help.)</p>
<p>What's going on here? <em>Speaking</em> of mirrors, the sexologist <a href="https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281">James Cantor speculates</a>: mirror neurons. Way, way back in the 1980s, Italian neuroscientists wired up the brains of macaque monkeys with electrodes, and noticed that some of the <em>same</em> brain regions would light up when the monkey grabbed a rasin, and when the monkey watched the <em>researcher</em> eat a rasin. These "mirror neurons" are speculated to form the basis of empathy.</p>
<p>So, the <em>phrase</em> "mirror neurons" is not and <em>cannot</em> be an answer. Real understanding is about detailed predictive models, not <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password">what words to repeat back in school</a>. I can't expect to understand the real answer without spending multiple years studying neuroscience, and if I did, I couldn't expect to transmit the model to you in one blog post. (That would be <em>several</em> blog posts.)</p>
<p>Still, the macaque–rasin anecdote is at least <em>suggestive</em> of hypotheses in the <em>general area</em> of, "The brain uses <em>shared</em> representations for 'self' and others, in a way such that it's possible for the part of the brain that computes sexual attraction to 'get confused' about the self–other distinction in a way that manifests as sexual desire to <em>be</em> the object of attraction." Or <em>something like that</em>.</p>
<p>More clues come in the form of the following trio of observations.</p>
<p>One, I'm not particularly repulsed by my own body in real life. ("Vague disappointment, sometimes" isn't the same thing as "repulsion".)</p>
<p>Two, my fantasies about having a female body aren't particularly, um, discriminating? On the contrary, if I had magical BodyApp tech, I would want to experiment with being different ages or races or body types of women.</p>
<p>Three, the thought being transformed into a <em>different</em> male body, other than my own, <em>is</em> repulsive. Perhaps less so in the sense that thinking about it is horrifying, and more that I <em>can't</em> think about it—my imagination "bounces off" the idea before any <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror">Body Horror</a> emotions can kick in.</p>
<p>These details seem hard to square with gender identity theories: why does my own male body, and <em>only</em> my own male body, seem "okay"? Whereas this is exactly what you would expect from the "male sexuality getting confused about a self–other distinction" story: I want to be transformed into all different sorts of women for the same reason ordinary straight guys <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-020-01730-x">want to fuck all different sorts of women</a>, and I can't even entertain the idea of being transformed into other men for the same reason ordinary straight guys can't even entertain the idea of fucking other men.</p>
<p>An interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—<a href="/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf">"erotic target location error"</a>?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be <a href="/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf">shy about generalizing across sexes</a> for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)</p>
<p>And this is actually what we see. Most men are attracted to women, but some fraction of them get off on the idea of <a href="https://pashasoffice.blogspot.com/2020/02/is-autogynephilia-actually.html"><em>being</em> or <em>becoming</em></a> women—autogynephilia. So if some men are attracted to, say, amputees, we would expect some fraction of <em>them</em> to <a href="/papers/lawrence-clinical_and_theoretical_paralells.pdf">get off on the idea of <em>being</em> amputees</a>—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria#History"><em>apotemnophilia</em></a>. Some men are, unfortunately, pedophiles, and <a href="/papers/hsu-bailey-autopedophilia.pdf">some fraction of them get off on the idea of being children</a>. Some men are interested in anthropomorphic animals, and <a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-hsu.pdf"><em>being</em> anthropomorphic animals</a>—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom">"furries"</a>.</p>
<p>Recently I had an occasion <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N">(don't ask)</a> to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called <em>agalmatophilia</em>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia">defined by <em>Wikipedia</em> as</a> "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—<em>wait for it</em> ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the <em>Wikipedia</em> editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general erotic-target-location-error hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are sexually interested in <em>X</em>, some fraction of them want to be <em>X</em>" is just <em>something you notice</em> when you honestly look at the world of guys who are sexually interested in arbitrary <em>X</em>.</p>
<p>And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few <em>vague</em> memories from <em>early</em> teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for the thing going on with me being an underlying erotic-target-location-error-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.</p>
<p>I don't <em>know</em> the details of what this "erotic target location error" thing is supposed to <em>be</em>, exactly—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if <em>anyone</em> knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think <em>some story in this general vicinity</em> has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How <em>else</em> do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's <a href="/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/">one of those sensitive bookish males</a> rather than being "macho") having the <em>conjunction</em> of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing <em>and</em>, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?</p>
<p><a id="am-i-supposed-to-claim"></a>Am I supposed to claim to be a lesbian trapped inside a man's body? That I <em>am</em> neurologically female in some real sense, and that's the true cause of my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing?</p>
<p><em>Maybe</em> that could be spun to seem superficially plausible to those who know me casually, but I don't know how to square that account with the <em>details</em> of my inner life (including the details that I wouldn't blog about if I didn't have to). I think if you used magical transformation technology to put an actual lesbian in a copy of my body, I can imagine her/him having <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror">Body Horror</a> at her/his alien new form and wish to be restored to her/his original body on <em>that</em> account, and maybe her/his identification with her/his former sex ("gender") would look <em>sort of</em> like my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (if you squint).</p>
<p>But I <em>don't</em> think she/he would spontaneously invent obsessively jacking off to fantasies of being able to magically transform into various <em>different</em> female bodies ... unless she was <em>already</em> into that stuff before being magically transformed into my twin. But ... is that even a thing among many (or any) lesbians? To be clear, there is a <em>lot</em> of porn in this genre! But it seems to entirely be created for and consumed by ... men? <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">Adult human males?</a></p>
<p>I just don't see any <em>reason</em> to doubt the obvious explanation that the root cause of my gender problems is specifically a bug in <em>male</em> sexuality. I didn't have the fancy vocabulary for it then, but the basic idea seemed pretty obvious in 2005, and seems equally obvious now.</p>
<p>(A "bug" with respect to the design criteria of evolution, not with respect to the human morality that affirms that I <em>like</em> being this way. Some, fearing stigma, would prefer to tone-police "bug" down to "variation", but people who don't <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YhNGY6ypoNbLJvDBu/rebelling-within-nature">understand the naturalistic fallacy</a> aren't going to understand anything <em>else</em> I'm saying, and I want to emphasize that the mirror-neurons-or-whatever and ordinary male sexuality weren't functionally optimized to collide like this.)</p>
<p>If I were to <em>actually</em> become female, it <em>wouldn't</em> seem like the scintillating apotheosis of sexual desire and the most important thing in the world. It would just feel normal, in the way that (I can only imagine) actual women feel their own existence is normal.</p>
<p>No doubt many women appreciate their own bodies, but a woman's positive body self-image experience of, "I feel attractive today", is going to be <em>very different</em> from the autogynephile-with-BodyApp's experience of, "Oh my God, I have <em>breasts</em> and a <em>vagina</em> that I can look at and touch <em>without needing anyone's permission</em>; this is <em>the scintillating apotheosis of sexual desire and the most important thing in the world.</em>"</p>
<p>In this way, autogynephilia is <em>intrinsically self-undermining</em> in a way that fantasies of flying to the moon are not. This doesn't in any way lessen the desire or make it go away—any more than <a href="https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1049">the guy who gets turned on by entropy decreasing in a closed system</a> would have his libido suddenly and permanently vanish upon learning about the second law of thermodynamics. But it does, I suspect, change the way you think of it: it makes a difference whether you interpret the desire as a confused anomaly in male sexuality—the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—or <em>take it literally</em>.</p>
<p>But the reasons not to take it literally might not be obvious to <em>everyone</em>. The detailed exposition above about what it would even mean to change sex is the result of a <em>lot</em> of thinking influenced by everything I've read and learned—and in particular, the reductionist methodology I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the very specific warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its predecessor in the Extropians mailing-list archives) that changing sex is a <em>hard problem</em>.</p>
<p>We can imagine that a male who was <em>like</em> me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who <a href="/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/">read different books in a different order</a>, might come to very different conclusions about himself.</p>
<p>If you don't have the conceptual vocabulary to say, "I have a lot of these beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings about being female, but it seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must be some sort of causal relationship between that and this erotic fantasy, which is realistically going to be a variation in <em>male</em> sexuality, such that it would be silly to interpret the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing literally" you might end up saying something simpler like, "I want to be a woman." Or possibly even, "I <em>am</em> a woman, on the inside, where it counts."</p>
<p>(As Yudkowsky <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences">occasionally</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid">remarks</a>, our <em>beliefs about</em> how our minds work have very little impact on how they actually work. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, but he was just wrong; the theory did not <em>become true of him</em> because he believed it.)</p>
<p>What theory I end up believing about myself <em>matters</em>, because <a href="/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/">different theories that purport to explain the same facts</a> can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.</p>
<p>If I have some objective inner female gender as the result of a brain-intersex condition, then getting on, and <em>staying</em> on, feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would presumably be a good idea specifically because my brain is designed to "run on" estrogen. But if my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are fundamentally a misinterpretation of misdirected <em>male</em> sexuality, then it's not clear that I <em>want</em> the psychological effects of HRT: if there were some unnatural way to give me a female (or just more female-<em>like</em>) body <em>without</em> messing with my internal neurochemistry, that would actually be <em>desirable</em>.</p>
<p>Or, you might think that if the desire is just a confusion in male sexuality, maybe real life body-modding <em>wouldn't</em> be desirable? Maybe autogynephilic men <em>think</em> they want female bodies, but if they actually transitioned in real life (as opposed to just having incompetently non-realistic daydreams about it all day and especially while masturbating), they would feel super-dysphoric about it, because (and which proves that) they're just perverted men, and not actual trans women, which are a different thing. You might think so!</p>
<p>But, empirically, I did grow (small) breasts as a result of <a href="/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/">my five-month HRT experiment</a>, and I think it's actually been a (small) quality-of-life improvement for approximately the reasons I expected going in. I just—like the æsthetic?—and wanted it to be part of <em>my</em> æsthetic, and now it is, and I don't quite remember what my chest was like before, kind of like how I don't quite remember what it was like to have boy-short hair before I grew out my signature beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (Though I'm <em>still</em> <a href="/2017/Nov/laser-1/">kicking myself for not</a> taking a bare-chested "before" photo.) I don't see any particular reason to believe this experience wouldn't replicate all the way down the <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">slope of interventions</a>.</p>
<p>Fundamentally, I think I can make <em>better decisions</em> for myself by virtue of having an accurate model of what's really going on with me—a model that uses all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, such that I have the language to talk about my obsessive paraphilic desire to be shaped like a woman without wanting to actually be a woman, similarly to how the <em>verthandi</em> in "Failed Utopia #4-2" aren't actually women.</p>
<p>If the <em>actual</em> desire implemented in one's actual brain in the real physical universe takes the form of (roughly translating from desire into English) "You know, I kind of want my own breasts (<em>&c.</em>)", it may be weird and perverted to <em>admit</em> this and act on it (!!)—but would it be any <em>less</em> weird and perverted to act on it under the false (in my case) pretense of an invisible female gender identity? If you know what the thing is, can it be any worse to just <em>own it</em>?</p>
<p>If we <em>actually had</em> magical perfect transformation technology or something close to it—if you could grow a female body in a vat, and transfer my brain into it, and had a proven solution to the motor-mapping and skull-size issues—if it cost $300,000, I would take out a bank loan and <em>do it</em>, and live happily ever after.</p>
<p>Since we <em>don't</em> have that ... the existing approximations don't really seem like a good idea for me, all things considered?</p>
<p>As a professional computer programmer, I have learned to fear complexity and dependencies. If you've ever wondered why it seems like <a href="https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/">all software is buggy and terrible</a>, it's because <em>no one knows what they're doing</em>. Each individual programmer and engineer understands their <em>piece</em> of the system well enough that companies can ship products that mostly do what they claim, but there's a lot of chaos and despair where the pieces don't quite fit and no one knows why.</p>
<p>But computing is the <em>easy</em> case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of evolved biological systems, and I think I have <a href="https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf">reason to be wary</a> of signing up to be a <em>lifelong medical patient</em>. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and universities, but the idealized Platonic forms of <em>their jobs</em>—are <em>much harder</em> than almost anyone realizes.</p>
<p><em>All</em> drugs have side-effects; <em>all</em> surgeries have the potential for complications. Through centuries of trial and error (where "error" means suffering and disfigurement and death), our civilization has accumulated a suite of hacks for which the benefits seem to exceed the costs (given circumstances you would prefer not to face in the first place).</p>
<p>In a miracle of science, someone made the observations to notice that human females have higher levels of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol">(8R,9S,13S,14S,17S)-13-Methyl-6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-decahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthrene-3,17-diol</a> than human males. In a glorious exhibition of mad science, someone did the experiments to notice that artificially synthesizing that ...-iol (or collecting it from <a href="https://www.fundforanimals.org/duchess-sanctuary/about-the-duchess-sanctuary/pregnant-mare-urine.html">pregnant horses' urine</a>) and administering it to males successfully pushes some aspects of their phenotype in the female direction: <a href="https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html">breast growth and fat redistribution and agreeableness—at the cost of sterility and increased risk of venous thromboembolism and osteoporosis</a>.</p>
<p>For all that my body is disappointingly male and therefore ugly, it <em>works</em>. It makes the hormones that it needs to function without me needing to <a href="/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/">dissolve a pill under my tongue</a> every day—without saddling me with extra dependencies on the supply chains that make the pills, or the professional apparatus to draw my blood and tell me what pills to take—without me needing to know what "hormones" <em>are</em>.</p>
<p>For all that my penis is boring at best and annoying at worst, it <em>works</em>. The organ does the things that it's designed to do; it lets me pee while standing up, and reward myself while pretending that it isn't there.</p>
<p>Did you know that trans women <a href="https://www.mtfsurgery.net/dilation.htm">have to dilate their neovagina after bottom surgery</a>? Yeah. There are these hard tubes of various widths, and you're supposed to stick them up there multiple times a day after surgery (and weekly indefinitely) to prevent the cavity from losing depth. I'm told that there are important technical reasons why it would be objectively wrong to use the phrase <em>open wound</em> in this situation, but the body doesn't know the important technical reasons and you still need to dilate.</p>
<p>I am glad that these interventions <em>exist</em> for the people who are brave and desperate enough to need them. But given that I'm not that desperate and not that brave, would it not be wiser to trust the paraphrased proverb and not look a gift man in the mouth?</p>
<p>My beautiful–beautiful ponytail was a <em>smart move</em> (and hair length isn't sexually dimorphic anyway; it's only our culture's <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">arbitrary gender conventions</a> that makes it seem relevant in this context).</p>
<p>My <a href="/tag/hrt-diary/">five-month HRT experiment</a> was a <em>smart move</em>, both for the beautiful–beautiful breast tissue, and <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForScience">For Science</a>.</p>
<p>My <a href="/tag/lasers/">laser beard removal sessions</a> were ... arguably a waste of money, since I still have to shave even after 13 treatments?—but it at least got the density of my ugly–gross facial hair down a bit. Trying it was definitely a <em>smart move</em> given what I knew at the time, and I <em>just might</em> be rich enough and disgusted-by-facial-hair enough to go back for more density-reduction. (Electrolysis gets better results than laser, but it's more expensive and a lot more painful.)</p>
<p><a id="movie-grade-mask"></a>People get cosmetic surgery sometimes for non-sex-change-related reasons. I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection. (Probably a <em>smarter move</em> to check out <a href="https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/">movie-grade latex masks</a> first, to see if it's at all possible to attain the bliss of passing in the mirror <em>without</em> taking a knife to my one and only real-life face.)</p>
<p>And I should probably look into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_hair_loss#Treatment">figuring out if there's anything to be done</a> for my hairline before it gets any worse?</p>
<p>But <em>staying</em> on transition-grade HRT indefinitely—doesn't seem like a smart move? Even though I would be happy with the fat-redistribution effects, I don't expect the health effects to be net-positive, and I don't expect the psychological effects to be net-desirable (even if I <a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/">wasn't</a> <a href="/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/">self-aware</a> enough to notice much besides libido change during my five-month experiment).</p>
<p>And <em>social</em> transition—really doesn't seem like a smart move? If we <em>actually had</em> magical perfect transformation technology, that would happen automatically (people are pretty good at noticing each other's sex), and I would expect to be very happy. (After some socio-psychological adjustment period; remember, in the real world, I didn't even manage to change <em>nicknames</em>.) But given that we <em>don't</em> have magical perfect transformation technology, I <em>don't expect to pull off</em> that kind of ... perma-<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game">LARP</a>. I mean <em>really</em> pull it off—everyone in Berkeley and Portland will be very careful to respect your pronouns the minute you come out, but <a href="/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/"><em>they will be lying</em></a>. I know, because I lie. Of course I <em>say</em> "she" when <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web">the intelligent social web</a> requires it—I'm not a <em>monster</em>—but it's only on a case-by-case basis whether I <em>believe</em> it.</p>
<p>It's definitely <a href="/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/"><em>possible</em> to pass alright</a> with a lot of work (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_therapy_(transgender)#Voice_feminization">voice training for trans women</a> is a thing!), but it's not clear why I would want to put in all that work, when overall, my life is fundamentally <em>okay</em> as ... a man? An adult human male? As a matter of objective fact, which doesn't care about my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings.</p>
<p>How dumb would I have to think you are, to expect you not to notice?</p>
<p>And how dumb would you have think I am, to expect me to expect you to <em>pretend</em> not to notice?</p>
<hr>
<p>Even if I never took the beautiful pure sacred self identity thing too literally, owning it for what it really is—an illusion, the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—takes a different tone in the harsh light of my deconversion from psychological-sex-differences denialism. In "Changing Emotions", Yudkowsky wrote—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don't think I'd call her "me". The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the comments, <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd">I wrote</a>—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is <em>No</em>?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I now realize that the correct answer to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me">the question</a> is—<em>yes!</em> Yes, it's cheating! Category-membership claims of the form "X is a Y" <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences">represent hidden probabilistic inferences</a>; inferring that entity X is a member of category Y means <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes">using observations about X to decide to use knowledge about members of Y to make predictions about features of X that you haven't observed yet</a>. But this AI trick can only <em>work</em> if the entities you've assigned to category Y are <em>actually</em> similar in the real world—if they form a tight cluster in configuration space, such that using the center of the cluster to make predictions about unobserved features gets you <em>close</em> to the right answer, on average.</p>
<p><a id="personal-identity"></a>The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a <em>very small</em> diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know.</p>
<p>In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person (like me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday), but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/">the Sorites problem</a> to come up. What if you could <em>interpolate</em> between two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both or some fraction of each of our memories? (You know, like <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)">Tuvix</a>.) At what point on the spectrum would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity">a book</a> with lots of these.)</p>
<p>People <em>do</em> change a lot over time; there <em>is</em> a sense in which, in some contexts, we <em>don't</em> want to say that a sixty-year-old is the "same person" they were when they were twenty—and forty years is "only" 4,870 three-day increments. But if a twenty-year-old were to be magically replaced with their sixty-year-old future self (not just superficially wearing an older body like a suit of clothing, but their brain actually encoding forty more years of experience and decay) ... well, there's a reason I reached for the word "replace" (suggesting putting a <em>different</em> thing in something's place) when describing the scenario. That's what Yudkowsky means by "the change is too sharp"—the <em>ordinary</em> sense in which we consider people as the "same person" from day to day (despite people having <a href="/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/">more than one proton</a> in a different place from day to day) has an implicit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity">Lipschitz condition</a> buried in it, an assumption that people don't change <em>too fast</em>.</p>
<p>The thing about Sorites problems is that they're <em>incredibly boring</em>. The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap", but in the edge-cases where we're not sure, arguing about whether to use the word "heap" <em>doesn't change the configuration of sand</em>. You might think that if <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray">the category is blurry</a>, you therefore have some freedom to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">draw its boundaries</a> the way you prefer—but <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">the probabilistic inferences you make on the basis of category membership can be quantitatively better or worse</a>. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">Preferences over concept definitions that aren't about maximizing predictive accuracy are therefore preferences <em>for deception</em></a>, because <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist">"making probability distributions less accurate in order to achieve some other goal" is what <em>deception</em> means</a>.</p>
<p>That's why defining your personal identity to get the answer you want is cheating. If the answer you wanted was actually <em>true</em>, you could just say so without needing to <em>want</em> it.</p>
<p>When <a href="/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/">Phineas Gage's</a> friends <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage">said he was "no longer Gage"</a> after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was <em>more relevantly similar</em> to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole stretch of spacetime.</p>
<p>Same principle when Yudkowsky wrote, "If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman [...] I don't think I'd call her 'me'". The claim is that psychological sex differences are large enough to violate the Lipschitz condition imposed by our <em>ordinary</em> concept of personal identity. Maybe he was wrong, but if so, that cashes out as being wrong <em>about</em> how similar women and men actually are (which in principle could be operationalized and precisely computed, even if <em>we</em> don't know how to make it precise), <em>not</em> whether we prefer the "call her me" or "don't call her me" conclusion and want to <em>retroactively redefine the meaning of the words in order to make the claim come out "true."</em></p>
<p>Do people ever really recover from being religious? I still endorse the underlying psychological motivation that makes me prefer the "call her me" conclusion, the <em>intention</em> that made me think I could get away with defining it to be true—even if I don't believe that anymore.</p>
<p>While <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/metaethics-sequence">the Sequence explaining Yudkowsky's metaethics</a> was being published (which a lot of people, including me, didn't quite "get" at the time; I found a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zqwWicCLNBSA5Ssmn/by-which-it-may-be-judged">later précis</a> easier to understand), I was put off by the extent to which Yudkowsky seemed to want to ground the specification of value in <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSXZpvqpa9vbGGLtG/thou-art-godshatter">the evolved design of the human brain</a>, as if culturally-defined values were irrelevant, to be wiped away by <a href="https://arbital.com/p/normative_extrapolated_volition/">the extrapolation of what people <em>would</em> want if they knew more, thought faster, <em>&c.</em></a>.</p>
<p>And the <em>reason</em> I felt that way was because I was aware of how much of a historical anomaly my sacred ideological value of antisexism was. Contrast to Yudkowsky's <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement/comment/vHNejGa6cRxh6kdnE">casually "sexist" speculation in the comment section</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If there are distinct categories of human transpersonal values, I would expect them to look like "male and female babies", "male children", "male adults", "female children", "female adults", "neurological damage 1", "neurological damage 2", not "Muslims vs. Christians!"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can see why this view would be unappealing to an ideologue eager to fight a culture war along an "Antisexism <em>vs.</em> Sexism" axis.</p>
<p>Looking back—I do think I had a point that culturally-inculcated values won't completely wash out under extrapolation, but I was wrong to conflate ideology with values as I did. I was vastly underestimating the extent to which your current sacred ideology <em>can</em> be shown to be meaningfully "wrong" with better information—and, by design of the extrapolation procedure, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat">this <em>shouldn't</em> be threatening</a>.</p>
<p>Your morality doesn't have to converge with that of your genetic twin who was raised in a culture with a different ideology—maybe culturally learned values from childhood get "frozen" after reasoning ability kicks in, such that I would never see eye-to-eye with my analogue who was raised with (say) a traditional Muslim view of relations between the sexes, no matter how much we debated and no matter how many new facts we learned.</p>
<p>At the same time, while reflecting on one's own values and how to refine them in response to new information and new situations, the question of what your genetic analogue raised in a different culture would think ... seems like <em>relevant and informative</em> information?</p>
<p>When I introspect on the <em>causes</em> of my whole gender ... <em>thing</em>, I see three parents in the causal graph: autogynephilia, being a sensitive boy rather than a macho guy, and my ideological commitment to antisexism (wanting to treat feminism as a religion, as a special case of egalitarianism as our state religion). The first two things seem likely to be more "innate", more robust to perturbations—but the the ideology thing mostly seems like a <em>mistake</em> insofar as it's committed to making bad predictions about human psychology—and the process of figuring out how to do better would benefit from looking at the space of <em>other</em> possible mistakes.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession">"Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a[n ideology] discovers a sense of beauty in it."</a> When figuring out how to <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility">rescue the spirit</a> of early-twenty-first century (pre-<a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020">Great Awokening</a>) egalitarian individualism in light of the terrible discovery that <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/"><em>none of this shit is true</em></a>, it's instructive to consider how you would have formulated your values, if you had always known the true state of affairs to begin with (even if, as a point of historical fact, your mistaken beliefs had a causal role in the development of the values you're trying to rescue).</p>
<p>Suppose it <em>is</em> true that female adults and male adults have distinct transpersonal values. At the time, I found the prospect horrifying—but that just shows that the design of male transpersonal values <em>contains within it</em> the potential (under appropriate cultural conditions) to be horrified by sex differences in transpersonal values. Naïvely, <a href="/2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/">I don't <em>want</em> it to be the case that women are a different thing that I don't understand</a>, but that preference <em>itself</em> probably arises out of—something like, the love of a man for a woman leading to, wanting to be aligned with women in the sense of AI alignment, to genuinely do right by them—which vision is threatened by the idea of the sexes having fundamentally different interests.</p>
<p>(During the vicissitudes of <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">my 2017 psychotic episode</a>, <a href="/images/cooperate_note.jpg">I wrote a note</a>: "cooperate with men who cooperate with women [who] cooperate with men who cooperate with women who cooperate with men".)</p>
<p>But what <em>constitutes</em> doing right by women, depends on the actual facts of the matter about psychological sex differences—if you <em>assume</em>, based on empathic inference, that the target of your benevolence is just like you, you might end up taking actions that hurt rather than help them if you live in one of the possible worlds where they're <em>not</em> just like you.</p>
<p>The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/">the features of human psychology that</a> make the object-level ideology <em>seem like a good idea</em>. That way, you can <em>update</em> when the thing that initially seemed like a good idea turns out to be a <em>bad</em> idea in light of new information about what was already the case the whole time. <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality">People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.</a></p>
<hr>
<p>Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird sexual obsession about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real and therefore morally okay to believe in after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science.</p>
<p>It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them). It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private and sensitive matters—like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights">one of the <em>defining political issues of our time</em></a>. But such an absurd scenario couldn't actually happen ... right??</p>Point Man2021-03-08T23:15:00-08:002021-03-08T23:15:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-03-08:/2021/Mar/point-man/<p>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.</p>
<p>One day, Zhao Gao announced a horse was being given …</p><p>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.</p>
<p>One day, Zhao Gao announced a horse was being given to the young Emperor as a gift—and presented a deer. The Emperor expressed confusion: "Perhaps the chancellor is mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" The other members of the imperial court were questioned. Some, reporting what they saw before them, said it was a deer. Others, fearing Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, or remained silent.</p>
<p>Later, Zhao Gao arranged for the execution of the courtiers who said it was a deer, or were silent.</p>
<p>It was all a test: the courtiers who agreed with Zhao Gao, even though what he said was absurd—<a href="https://spandrell.com/2015/06/03/the-purpose-of-absurdity/">precisely <em>because</em> it was absurd</a>—proved their loyalty to him, whereas the ones who spoke the plain truth revealed themselves as untrustworthy for his purposes: to agree with a true claim would be compatible with either loyalty or mere honesty, but to agree with absurdity leaves <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/12/15/motive-ambiguity/">no ambiguity about one's motives</a>. From this story comes the Chinese <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu">four-character idiom</a> <em>point deer make horse</em>, to deliberately misrepresent.</p>
<p>I used to wonder: what was it like to be one of the courtiers who survived the test? Did they consciously think, "Well, I don't know <em>why</em> Zhao Gao is calling this deer a horse, but he seems serious, so I'd better play along, too"—or did they trust Zhao Gao's words more than their own eyes, and manage to really believe themselves that it was a horse?</p>
<p>These days, I have a different question.</p>
<p>What was it like to be the <em>deer</em>? To be <em>used</em> like that, as a prop in someone else's political power game, without having any idea what's going on?</p>
<hr>
<p>During a recent discussion of gender and pronoun conventions, I received a <em>fascinating</em> reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the <em>Zeitgeist</em> that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I can imagine a sane society using <em>he</em> and <em>she</em> to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average <strong>conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.</strong> (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)</p>
<p>I agree that there's going to be some confusion if you talk about someone as a "she" and the person who turns up is obviously a.m.a.b. But I think the confusion that results from calling them "she" is a lot more consequential. Progressive communication norms absolutely reflect a concern for information efficiency! It takes a lot less time to say "she" than it does to say "he, but I also think trans people are great."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Bolding mine.)</p>
<p>I see. So the <a href="/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/">new norms</a> are optimized to convey information <em>about the speaker</em> <a href="http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/21/pronouns-and-the-purpose-of-language/">rather than what is being spoken about</a>.</p>
<p>Almost like ... a loyalty test?</p>
<p>And the less intuitive it is, the better it works <em>as</em> a loyalty test: referring to an obviously male person as <em>he</em> merely reflects conventional usage and reveals no information about one's motives, whereas referring to an obvious male as <em>she</em>—or using singular <em>they</em> for a named individual whose sex is apparent—extracts a cognitive cost, however slight—a cost <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory">allies are more willing to pay than non-allies</a>.</p>
<p>I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, of course; just the design signature of <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">cultural evolution</a>.</p>
<p>Here's my theory. As a very rare biological anomaly, there have always been an extreme right tail of very masculine lesbians who fit into Society better as men and very feminine gay men who fit into Society better as women, and twentieth-century doctors developed medical interventions to aid them in this transformation. This worked pretty well.</p>
<p>Separately, there are, and <a href="http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/On-Becoming-A-Woman.pdf">perhaps</a> <a href="/2017/Mar/nothing-new-under-the-sun/">always</a> have been, paraphilic men who wished they were women—autogynephiles—and the extreme right tail of them also sought out interventions from the twentieth-century doctors. Tragically, this <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/a-passing-privilege/">didn't usually work as well</a>, but it was rare enough for autogynephiles to actually attempt it (as opposed to privately fantasizing or playing dress-up) that it didn't have much impact on the social order.</p>
<p>The legal changes required for the twentieth-century doctors' innovation was sponsored by <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/">the political coalition of individually non-hegemonic identity groups</a>, whose organizing principle had always been to fight on behalf of the marginalized—those who, without the coalition's sponsorship, would have been (even more) victimized by the hegemonic social order.</p>
<p>But when the source of a coalition's power rests on the loyalty of the victims it protects, and of their allies, then those seeking to win more power for the coalition have an incentive to both create more victims, and distinguish loyal from fair-weather allies.</p>
<p>Aggressively marketing "being trans" as an atomic identity that <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">everyone needs to celebrate on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide</a>, serves both functions: a lot of young men with autogynephilia or internalized misandry, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy">quirky but impressionable teenage girls</a>, get recruited to the victimhood coalition (who might have otherwise gotten married and joined the power base of the hegemonic social order), <em>and</em> everyone who cares about having a public concept of biological sex gets "outed" as an insufficiently-loyal ally (who can't free-ride off the coalition's successes without contributing). <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/real-meaning-of-diversity/">It works even better if</a> any group that doesn't have the necessary quota of trans people is marked for political attack on the grounds of being insufficiently inclusive.</p>
<p>Again, no individual mastermind is required for <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">the collective outcome to play out this way</a>. Being proud of a political group identity and seeking to promote its strength and power is <em>normal</em>. Being suspicious of those who refuse to pay the cost of signaling loyalty to the group is <em>normal</em>. Wanting to change sex is—not "normal" exactly, but a <em>reasonably common and harmless fantasy</em> (the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought) that a lot of people have without being in the homosexual extreme-right-tail-of-sex-atypical-behavior taxon that sex reassignment was invented for. (<a href="/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf">A 1994 study found that</a> among college students, 5.6% of males and 13.2% of females had fantasized about being the opposite sex.)</p>
<p>As a transhumanist, I believe that fantasies deserve to be fulfilled—but <em>actually</em> fulfilled, fulfilled <em>for real</em>, not humored by <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/">everyone forcing everyone else</a> to pretend in order to maintain the equilibrium in some idiot political game.</p>
<p>I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just <em>want</em> it. (I would want it if the technology were better.) But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about this mysterious "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/">isn't helping transsexuals</a> who have successfully transitioned and moved on with their lives. Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt this culture is helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only <em>knew</em> in detail what they're selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.</p>
<p>And, and—that poor deer!</p>Link: "See Color"2021-03-07T22:05:00-08:002021-03-07T22:05:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-03-07:/2021/Mar/link-see-color/<blockquote>
<p><em>Here we are in the future<br>
Here we are in the future and it's wrong</em></p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN9QWefQ7XE">"Who We Are"</a>, <em>Steven Universe: The Movie</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whether or not you <em>support</em> the ongoing ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology">successor ideology</a>, it is imperative that students of literature …</p><blockquote>
<p><em>Here we are in the future<br>
Here we are in the future and it's wrong</em></p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN9QWefQ7XE">"Who We Are"</a>, <em>Steven Universe: The Movie</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whether or not you <em>support</em> the ongoing ideological transition from late-20th-century individualist "content of their character" liberalism to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Successor_ideology">successor ideology</a>, it is imperative that students of literature and the arts know how to judge propaganda on its merits: not everything that tries to teach good morals is good <em>art</em>, and not everything your ideological enemies put out is badly done, either.</p>
<p>It is in this spirit that I say that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkVgGYm4xo">the new <em>Steven Universe</em> anti-racism public service announcement</a> is a <em>masterfully well-executed</em> piece of propaganda. It's <em>actually persuasive</em>. I've <em>never seen anything like it</em>.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zJkVgGYm4xo" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>There's some sense in which I think the creators "got lucky" with this short—I didn't think much of the two prior entries in <a href="https://www.crystalgemsspeakup.com/">the series</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JheC-_8I5A">"Tell the Whole Story"</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA0KTFdnBk8">"Don't Deny It—Defy It"</a>, which follow the same pattern of portraying the filming of a 1990s-alike liberal PSA being interrupted by the actors supplying a more up-to-date woke moral. (I found Pearl's rant in "Tell the Whole Story" unpersuasive—you would expect systemic racism to suppress black accomplishment in the past, not just the portrayal thereof in modern textbooks; as for "Don't Deny It", I was too distracted by the kids taking gay marriage for granted to process the claim that anti-miscegenation attitudes are still a potent threat—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia"><em>Loving</em></a> was <em>forty-eight years</em> before <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obergefell_v._Hodges"><em>Obergefell</em></a>.)</p>
<p>In contrast, "See Color"'s attacks on old-school liberalism <em>land</em>. We open to a '90s-alike PSA invoking the "doesn't matter if you're black, white, or purple" trope (which has been cringe for as long as I (born 1987) can remember, but which I imagine sounded progressive the <em>first</em> time someone said it), until Amethyst breaks character to object to the script—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>AMETHYST: What the—woah, woah, woah. Hold up a minute here. Ugh, who wrote this? I think it kind of <em>does</em> matter that I'm purple? I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien.</p>
<p>BLACK KID: Well I'm not an alien, but it definitely matters to me that I'm black.</p>
<p>WHITE KID: Yeah, it makes a difference that I'm white. [to BLACK KID] I know the two of us get treated, very differently.</p>
<p>AMETHYST: I just think it's messed up to compare me being an alien, to you two being different races. You're both human; you're totally biologically the same. Adding purple people into a lesson about human racism makes no sense. </p>
<p>BLACK KID and WHITE KID: [in unison] Yeah, that is pretty weird.</p>
<p>WHITE KID: I think people with the 'black, white, or purple' thing because adding a fantasy race in there helps distract from the actual racism black people have to deal with.</p>
<p>BLACK KID: Right. My experience with anti-black racism is really specific. Other people of color experience other forms of racism, too. But you won't see any of that if you don't see color.</p>
<p>AMETHYST: Dude, so this entire public service announcement could be a ploy to avoid talking about racism altogether! Hey, ah, could we get a rewrite where we appreciate each other without erasing what makes each of us different?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How is the old-school liberal to reply to this? I say: the function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a <em>principle</em> of equal treatment. Adding a fantasy race in there highlights the universality of our commitment to equality: purple magical alien gem superheroines might not exist, but if they <em>did</em>, they would be entitled to the same rights and dignity as everyone.</p>
<p>But how should our principle of majestic equality be applied? <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">Categories summarize information</a>—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">cluster-structure in the real world</a>. As a matter of AI design, there would be no <em>functional</em> reason to assign entities to different categories, if they didn't differ in <em>some</em> decision-relevant ways. The reason it's pretty weird to reference Amethyst's skin color in a lesson about human racism, is because the challenges Amethyst might face as a gem in a world of humans—perhaps the perceptual skew of living thousands of years when most humans don't see a hundred—are going to depend on the ways in which gems and humans are actually different, which don't apply to humans of different races who are relevantly the same.</p>
<p>In this way, we see that old-school liberalism is effectively the position that race <em>shouldn't exist</em> as a cognitively meaningful category. But is it that easy? If there's some sense in which race <em>does</em> exist—even just as a social "type tag" based on superficial anatomic markers in humans who are <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/">otherwise totally biologically the same</a>—then verbally claiming to pretend that it doesn't, isn't a realistic or <em>honest</em> strategy for remediating the harm done by <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">unfair conventions that culturally evolved around the presence of the category</a>.</p>You Are Right and I Was Wrong: Reply to Tailcalled on Causality2021-02-01T05:00:00-08:002021-02-01T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-02-01:/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/<p>Friend of the blog <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/causality-is-essential-reply-to-mtsw-on-autogynephilia/">Tailcalled responds to</a> my <a href="/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/">2016 response to Ozy on autogynephilia</a>!</p>
<p>Summarizing—<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/">Ozy had claimed that</a> the concept of <em>autogynephilia</em> is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women <em>also</em> have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant …</p><p>Friend of the blog <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/causality-is-essential-reply-to-mtsw-on-autogynephilia/">Tailcalled responds to</a> my <a href="/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/">2016 response to Ozy on autogynephilia</a>!</p>
<p>Summarizing—<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/">Ozy had claimed that</a> the concept of <em>autogynephilia</em> is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women <em>also</em> have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant gender issues.</p>
<p>I was, and am, intensely skeptical that these are really three separate things. I think it's more parsimonious to suppose that some males are autogynephilic, and that some fraction of them go on to develop sex dysphoria, rather than to posit <em>different</em> causes for what really <em>looks like</em> <a href="http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/05/reconceptualizing-autogynephilia-as_26.html">the same erotic phenomenon</a> depending on whether the person goes on to transition or not. But at the time, I didn't have the language to properly articulate the theoretical basis of my skepticism. Frustrated by the tendency I perceived of many trans advocates to <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">resist scientific generalizations about psychology</a> while acknowledging the empirical correlations that motivate the generalizations, I wrote, "Summarizing correlations is the <em>entire point</em> of making a taxonomy."</p>
<p>But as Tailcalled's response points out, this is just wrong! Different causal theories can generate the same correlations in a particular set of observations, while still making meaningfully and drastically different claims about the world.</p>
<p>As an illustrative example, suppose you observe that among professional athletes in Chicago, <a href="https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/185700267974/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2018-2019">basketball players wear red jerseys</a>, but <a href="http://www.gridiron-uniforms.com/GUD/images/2020_Chicago.png">gridiron football players wear navy-blue jerseys</a>. Reifying these observations into a two-type "basketball/red" and "football/blue" taxonomy of professional athletes is perhaps not the <em>worst</em> theory—it does <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">compress the length of the message needed to describe your observations</a>—but it's definitely not a <em>good</em> one, largely because it's so <em>fragile</em>: it completely breaks down the moment you leave Chicago, or <a href="https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/635656121361809408/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2020-2021">the Bulls unveil a new jersey</a>, or you just look at what the <em>visiting</em> team is wearing. And it's fragile <em>because</em> it doesn't reflect what's "really going on" in the world: in fact, what color shirt you're wearing doesn't causally affect what games you can play, and <em>vice versa</em>.</p>
<p>In the case of sex dysphoria in <a href="/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/">developmental males</a>, I think the documented correlations between age-of-onset, sexual orientation, history of female embodiment fantasies, <em>&c.</em>, <em>do</em> reflect distinct taxons in what's really going on in the world. (If I only get one table to showcase the correlational data, I'll pick <a href="/images/lawrence_table_vi.png">Table VI</a> from Anne Lawrence's <a href="/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf">"Sexuality Before and After Male-to-Female Sex Reassignment Surgery"</a>.) I think alternative theories that try to explain the same bimodality in the data, such as <a href="/papers/veale-clarke-lomax-identity-defense_model_of_gender-variance_development.pdf">Veale, Clarke, and Lomax's identity defense model</a> (which chalks up the difference to whether or not defense mechanisms are used to suppress a gender-variant identity) are a stretch.</p>
<p>But I'm making that scientific judgment between theories based on my own parsimony intuitions applied to everything I've read and seen; <em>convincing</em> someone else who doesn't already think the same the way is, and should be, a <em>lot</em> more work. Trying to get away with "You agree to the bimodality, therefore you must agree to the taxonomy" would be both <em>lazy</em> and <em>wrong</em>, and I thank Tailcalled for his vigilance.</p>Link: "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"2021-01-08T14:30:00-08:002021-01-08T14:30:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2021-01-08:/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/<p>Sorry for the off-topic linkpost, but I want to point to a fascinating <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">new mathematical philosophy-of-language post</a> on <em>Less Wrong</em> <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">(alternative viewer)</a>! 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 …</p><p>Sorry for the off-topic linkpost, but I want to point to a fascinating <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">new mathematical philosophy-of-language post</a> on <em>Less Wrong</em> <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception">(alternative viewer)</a>! 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.
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Liability2020-12-24T18:15:00-08:002020-12-24T18:15:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-12-24:/2020/Dec/liability/<blockquote>
<p><em>I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested<br>
I'd like to think that if I was I would pass<br>
Look at the tested and think "there but for the grace go I"<br>
Might be a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out</em></p>
<p>—"The Impression That I Get …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p><em>I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested<br>
I'd like to think that if I was I would pass<br>
Look at the tested and think "there but for the grace go I"<br>
Might be a coward, I'm afraid of what I might find out</em></p>
<p>—"The Impression That I Get" by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We can't change the past. When someone does something wrong, the act of saying "Sorry" doesn't help. Actually feeling sorry doesn't help, either. Saying or feeling sorry can only help as part of a process that <em>decreases the measure</em> of the wrong across the multiverse. We can't change <em>our</em> past, but we can update on its evidence—use the memories and records of it as input to a function that <em>changes who we are</em> in a way that makes us perform better in the future (which is somebody else's past). And we can create timeless incentives: if people <em>know</em> that history (and the court system) has its eyes on them, they might do things differently than they would if they knew no one would ever hold them to account.</p>
<p>The <em>update</em> part is more important than the timeless-incentives part. The first duty is to investigate exactly <em>what happened</em> and <em>why</em>. If you can learn the causal graph, you can compute counterfactuals: <em>if</em> this-and-such detail had been different but everything else had been the same, what would have happened instead? If you can compute that if this-and-such detail had been different, then something better would have happened, then you can make advance plans and take advance precautions to make sure the analogous detail takes a more favorable value in analogous future situations.</p>
<p>And, yeah, in addition to making better plans, you can also do incentives (to timelessly influence the past) and restitution (to try to make up for the past): punish the guilty, give them bad reputations, make them pay cash damages to their victims, <em>&c.</em> But you have to get the facts <em>first</em>, so that you can compute <em>what</em> punishments, reputations, and restitution to impose.</p>
<p>You must thoroughly research this, not only when your actions participated in disaster, but also when your actions participate in a near-miss "warning shot." It is <em>not</em> the case that all's well that ends well when you're playing for measure in many worlds. If you were in a situation where disaster had probability 0.5, and disaster didn't happen, that just means <em>this</em> copy of you got lucky.</p>
<p>And just because <em>this</em> copy of you doesn't have blood on her hands, doesn't mean you're innocent.</p>
<p>Wanting a fair trial isn't the same thing as claiming to be innocent. It's wanting an accurate shared account of <em>exactly</em> what you're guilty of.</p>Crossing the Line2020-12-17T14:00:00-08:002020-12-17T14:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-12-17:/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/<blockquote>
<p><em>There are lines I've always felt I had to toe<br>
Some were blurry, some unseen<br>
Some I've had to learn to read between<br>
So many boundaries<br>
Far more than you know</em></p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbaMiK9oqJE">"Crossing the Line" (extended lyrics)</a>, <em>Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Emily Cibelli, Yang Xu, Joseph L. Austerweil, Thomas L. Griffiths, and …</p><blockquote>
<p><em>There are lines I've always felt I had to toe<br>
Some were blurry, some unseen<br>
Some I've had to learn to read between<br>
So many boundaries<br>
Far more than you know</em></p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbaMiK9oqJE">"Crossing the Line" (extended lyrics)</a>, <em>Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Emily Cibelli, Yang Xu, Joseph L. Austerweil, Thomas L. Griffiths, and Terry Regier's <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158725">"The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference: Evidence From the Domain of Color"</a> is a cool paper about how language affects how people remember colors! You would expect the design of the eye and its colorspace to be human-universal (<em>modulo</em> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness">colorblindness</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy#Humans">maybe some women with</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW">both</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW2">kinds</a> of green opsin gene), but not all languages have the same set of color words. There are some regularities: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms">all languages have words for light and dark; if they have a third color word, then it's <em>red</em>; if there's a fourth, it'll cover green or yellow</a>—but the details differ, as different languages <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">stumbled onto different conventions</a>. Do the color category conventions in one's native tongue affect how people think about color, in accordance with the famous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity">Sapir–Whorf hypothesis</a>? Maybe—but if so, how??</p>
<p>Cibelli, Xu, <em>et al.</em> discuss an experiment where people are briefly shown a color, and then try to match it on a color wheel, either at the same time, or after a short delay. People aren't just not-perfect at this, but—particularly in the delayed condition—show a non-monotonic pattern of directional bias: colors just on the "blue" side of the green–blue boundary are remembered as being relatively more bluish than they really were, but <em>very similar</em> colors on the "green" side of the boundary are remembered as being relatively more greenish than they really were. (Where what counts as "blue" and "green" was operationalized by asking the same subjects to rate colors on a "not at all" to "perfectly" blue/green scale.)</p>
<p>How to explain this curious pattern of observations? The answer is—Bayesian reasoning! <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure">(The answer is always Bayesian reasoning.)</a> Our authors propose a model in which a stimulus is encoded in the brain as both a fine-grained representation of what was actually seen (this-and-such color perception, with some noise/measurement-error), and as a category ("green"). Then a reconstruction of the stimulus that uses both the fine-grained representation and the category, will be biased towards the center of the category, with more bias when the fine-grained representation is more uncertain (as in the delayed condition).</p>
<p>The model gains further support from a similar "two-alternative forced-choice" experiment, where people try to tell the difference between the originally-displayed color and a distractor (rather than picking from a color wheel). English speakers are better distinguishing between an original and distractor on opposite sides of the green–blue boundary. Speakers of Berinmo (spoken in Papua New Guinea) and Himba (spoken in Namibia) don't have the green–blue distinction, but the Berinmo <em>wor</em>–<em>nol</em> and Himba <em>dumbu</em>–<em>burou</em> boundaries fall between what English speakers would call <em>yellow</em> and <em>green</em>. And as the model predicts, Berinmo and Himba speakers respectively do better at distinguishing between original and distractor on opposite sides of the <em>wor</em>–<em>nol</em> and <em>dumbu</em>–<em>burou</em> boundaries!</p>
<p>In addition to superior cross-category discrimination, the model also successfully predicts a <em>within</em>-category bias. Suppose one stimulus, which we'll call <em>A</em>, is a more central example of its category than stimulus <em>B</em>. Then in the two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, it's easier to distinguish <em>A</em> as an original from distractor <em>B</em> than it is to distinguish <em>B</em> as an original from distractor <em>A</em>, because the exceptional case <em>B</em> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean">regresses towards the mean</a> in memory.</p>
<p>Regular readers of <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> know where I'm going with this! Why do we care about the further question of what "gender" someone is, if we already have fine-grained perceptions of how the person looks and behaves? Because our brains <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#everyday-base-rates">use category-membership as an input into predictions when our perceptions are uncertain</a>.</p>
<p>If categories influence judgement on tasks as simple as <em>remembering colors</em>, then on theoretical grounds, I would expect the effect of gender on perception of people to be <em>much</em> worse (that is, larger), because people are much more complicated than colors. With colors, what you see is <em>basically</em> what there is: if your memories or perception of 500-nanometer wavelength light get rounded off slightly bluewards or greenwards depending on how many color words are in your native language, that's bad compared to what a well-designed AI with access to the pure, unmediated colorspace could perceive, but at least that bias is only acting on the <em>one</em> dimension of color. In contrast, your observations of a particular person are going to be much sparser than everything your brain might want to predict about that person. Under those circumstances, the dominant algorithm might end up <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff">eating bias in order to reduce variance</a> by having your priors about what humans are like do a greater share of the work—work that relies on the ways (<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16173891/">some blurry</a>, <a href="/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/">some unseen</a>) that female humans are different from male humans.</p>
<p>Transgender people are in a uniquely epistemically privileged position to observe this process, as the change from not-passing to passing is simultaneously a <em>small</em> one as far as the person themselves is concerned, and a <em>large</em> one as far as how the person is percieved by others. In a couple paragraphs that make me feel sad and jealous (I can't say <em>dysphoric</em> because I don't know what that word means), Julia Serano explains what it's like to cross that line (in Ch. 8, "Dismantling Cissexual Privilege", of <em>Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity</em>):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[W]hen I eventually did transition, I chose not to put on a performance—I simply acted, dressed, and spoke the way I always had, the way that felt most comfortable to me. After being on female hormones for a few months, I found that people began to consistently gender me as female despite the fact that I was "doing" my gender the same way I always had. What I found most striking was how other people interpreted my same actions and mannerisms differently based on whether they perceived me as female or male. For example, when ordering drinks at bars, I found that if I looked around the room while waiting for my drink (as I always unconsciously had prior to transitioning), men started hitting on me because they assumed I was signaling my availability (when I was male, the same action was likely to be interpreted simply as me scoping out the room). And in supermarket checkout lines, when the child in the cart ahead of me started smiling and talking to me, I found that I could interact with them without their mother becoming suspicious or fearful (which is what often happened in similar situations where I was perceived as male).</p>
<p>During the first year of my transition, I experienced hundreds of little moments like that, where other people interpreted my words and actions differently based solely on the change in my perceived sex. And it was not merely my behaviors that were interpreted differently, it was my body as well: the way people approached me, spoke to me, the assumptions they made about me, the lack of deference and respect I often received, the way others often sexualized my body. All of these changes occured without my having to say or do a thing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Serano goes on to suggest that social gender exists, not in the way individuals perform gender, but in how others perceive it, and that therefore efforts to create a less oppressive world must involve dismantling cisnormative assumptions: "if we truly want to bring an end to all gender-based oppression, then we must begin by taking responsibility for our own perceptions and presumptions[; t]he most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies."</p>
<p>I can see how one might derive that lesson from the described experiences of transitioning, but I think it's ultimately a flawed generalization from a <em>necessarily</em> unrepresentative experience. The ways people treated Serano differently after she transitioned despite Serano being the same person the whole time, are not <em>arbitrary</em>: that happened <em>because</em> the fact that Serano looked like a woman, prompted people to use mental models trained against the distribution of <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">adult human females</a>. (There might be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_in_primates"><em>reasons</em> going back hundreds of millions of years</a> for primate mothers to become suspicious or fearful of males near their children.)</p>
<p>In the same chapter of <em>Whipping Girl</em>, Serano mentions that in her days of identifying as a male crossdresser, she found it easier to pass in suburban areas rather than cities, "where people were presumably more aware of the existence of gender-variant people." This also makes tragic Bayesian sense: transitioning to organically be perceived as the other sex is easier to pull off when it's unexpected, because the lower the prior, the less of a <a href="/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/">likelihood ratio you need</a> in order to reach a given posterior probability.</p>
<p>The change in other agents' behaviors elicited by crossing the line into <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution">sending the signals</a> of a different type is so dramatic specifically <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist"><em>because</em> it's a rare, off-equilibrium play</a>. Lines between categories are placed in the no man's land between <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace">regions of unusually high probability-density in configuration space</a>. If there were much more probability-mass just on either side of a line people are using to make predictions and decisions, then <em>the line wouldn't be there</em>. </p>Survey Data on Cis and Trans Women Among Haskell Programmers2020-11-24T22:12:00-08:002020-11-24T22:12:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-11-24:/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/<p>Stereotypically, computer programming is both a predominantly male profession and the quintessential profession of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women. Stereotypically, these demographic trends are even more pronounced in communities around "niche" or academic technologies (<em>e.g.</em>, Haskell), rather than those with more established mainstream use (<em>e.g.</em>, JavaScript).</p>
<p>But stereotypes can be …</p><p>Stereotypically, computer programming is both a predominantly male profession and the quintessential profession of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women. Stereotypically, these demographic trends are even more pronounced in communities around "niche" or academic technologies (<em>e.g.</em>, Haskell), rather than those with more established mainstream use (<em>e.g.</em>, JavaScript).</p>
<p>But stereotypes can be <em>wrong</em>! The heuristic process by which people's brains form stereotypes from experience are riddled with cognitive biases that prevent our mental model of what people are like from matching what people are <em>actually</em> like. Unless you believe <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy#Definition_and_basic_example">a woman is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller (which is <em>mathematically impossible</em>)</a>, you're best off seeking <em>hard numbers</em> about what people are like rather than relying on mere stereotypes.</p>
<p>Fortunately, sometimes hard numbers are available! Taylor Fausak has been administering an annual State of Haskell survey <a href="https://taylor.fausak.me/2017/11/15/2017-state-of-haskell-survey-results/">since 2017</a>, and the <a href="https://taylor.fausak.me/2018/11/18/2018-state-of-haskell-survey-results/">2018</a>, <a href="https://taylor.fausak.me/2019/11/16/haskell-survey-results/">2019</a>, and <a href="https://taylor.fausak.me/2020/11/22/haskell-survey-results/">2020</a> surveys included optional "What is your gender?" and "Do you identify as transgender?" questions. I wrote a script to use these answers from the published <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values">CSV</a> response data for the 2018–2020 surveys to tally the number of cis and trans women among survey respondents. (In Python. Sorry.)</p>
<div class=highlight><pre><span></span><span class=kn>import</span> <span class=nn>csv</span>
<span class=n>survey_results_filenames</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=p>[</span>
<span class=s2>"2018-11-18-2018-state-of-haskell-survey-results.csv"</span><span class=p>,</span>
<span class=s2>"2019-11-16-state-of-haskell-survey-results.csv"</span><span class=p>,</span>
<span class=s2>"2020-11-22-haskell-survey-results.csv"</span><span class=p>,</span>
<span class=p>]</span>
<span class=k>if</span> <span class=vm>__name__</span> <span class=o>==</span> <span class=s2>"__main__"</span><span class=p>:</span>
<span class=k>for</span> <span class=n>results_filename</span> <span class=ow>in</span> <span class=n>survey_results_filenames</span><span class=p>:</span>
<span class=n>year</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>_</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>results_filename</span><span class=o>.</span><span class=n>split</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=s2>"-"</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>with</span> <span class=nb>open</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>results_filename</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=k>as</span> <span class=n>results_file</span><span class=p>:</span>
<span class=n>reader</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>csv</span><span class=o>.</span><span class=n>DictReader</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>results_file</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>total</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=mi>0</span>
<span class=n>cis_f</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=mi>0</span>
<span class=n>trans_f</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=mi>0</span>
<span class=k>for</span> <span class=n>row</span> <span class=ow>in</span> <span class=n>reader</span><span class=p>:</span>
<span class=c1># 2018 and 2019 CSV header has the full question, but</span>
<span class=c1># 2020 uses sXqY format</span>
<span class=n>gender_answer</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=p>(</span>
<span class=n>row</span><span class=o>.</span><span class=n>get</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=s2>"What is your gender?"</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=ow>or</span> <span class=n>row</span><span class=o>.</span><span class=n>get</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=s2>"s7q2"</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>transwer</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=p>(</span>
<span class=n>row</span><span class=o>.</span><span class=n>get</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=s2>"Do you identify as transgender?"</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=ow>or</span>
<span class=n>row</span><span class=o>.</span><span class=n>get</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=s2>"s7q3"</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>if</span> <span class=ow>not</span> <span class=p>(</span><span class=n>gender_answer</span> <span class=ow>and</span> <span class=n>transwer</span><span class=p>):</span>
<span class=k>continue</span>
<span class=n>total</span> <span class=o>+=</span> <span class=mi>1</span>
<span class=k>if</span> <span class=n>gender_answer</span> <span class=o>==</span> <span class=s2>"Female"</span><span class=p>:</span>
<span class=k>if</span> <span class=n>transwer</span> <span class=o>==</span> <span class=s2>"No"</span><span class=p>:</span>
<span class=n>cis_f</span> <span class=o>+=</span> <span class=mi>1</span>
<span class=k>elif</span> <span class=n>transwer</span> <span class=o>==</span> <span class=s2>"Yes"</span><span class=p>:</span>
<span class=n>trans_f</span> <span class=o>+=</span> <span class=mi>1</span>
<span class=k>print</span><span class=p>(</span>
<span class=s2>"{}: total: {}, "</span>
<span class=s2>"cis-♀: {} ({:.2f}%), trans-♀: {} ({:.2f}%)"</span><span class=o>.</span><span class=n>format</span><span class=p>(</span>
<span class=n>year</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>total</span><span class=p>,</span>
<span class=n>cis_f</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>100</span><span class=o>*</span><span class=n>cis_f</span><span class=o>/</span><span class=n>total</span><span class=p>,</span>
<span class=n>trans_f</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>100</span><span class=o>*</span><span class=n>trans_f</span><span class=o>/</span><span class=n>total</span><span class=p>,</span>
<span class=p>)</span>
<span class=p>)</span>
</pre></div>
<p>It prints this tally:</p>
<div class=highlight><pre><span></span><span class=mi>2018</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=n>total</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>1108</span><span class=o>,</span> <span class=n>cis</span><span class=o>-</span><span class=err>♀</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>26</span> <span class=o>(</span><span class=mf>2.35</span><span class=o>%),</span> <span class=n>trans</span><span class=o>-</span><span class=err>♀</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>19</span> <span class=o>(</span><span class=mf>1.71</span><span class=o>%)</span>
<span class=mi>2019</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=n>total</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>1131</span><span class=o>,</span> <span class=n>cis</span><span class=o>-</span><span class=err>♀</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>16</span> <span class=o>(</span><span class=mf>1.41</span><span class=o>%),</span> <span class=n>trans</span><span class=o>-</span><span class=err>♀</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>16</span> <span class=o>(</span><span class=mf>1.41</span><span class=o>%)</span>
<span class=mi>2020</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=n>total</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>1192</span><span class=o>,</span> <span class=n>cis</span><span class=o>-</span><span class=err>♀</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>12</span> <span class=o>(</span><span class=mf>1.01</span><span class=o>%),</span> <span class=n>trans</span><span class=o>-</span><span class=err>♀</span><span class=o>:</span> <span class=mi>21</span> <span class=o>(</span><span class=mf>1.76</span><span class=o>%)</span>
</pre></div>
<p>In this particular case, it looks like the stereotypes are true: only about 3% of Haskell programmers (who took the survey and answered both questions) are women, and they're about equally likely to be cis or trans. (There were more cis women in 2018, and more trans women in 2020, but the sample size is too small to infer a trend.) In contrast, the ratio of cis women to trans women in the general population is probably more like 170:1.<sup id=survey-data-on-cis-and-note-1-back><a href=#survey-data-on-cis-and-note-1 class=simple-footnote title="A 2016 report by the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles estimated the trans share of the United States population at 0.58%, and (1−0.0058)/0.0058 ≈ 171.4.">1</a></sup></p>
<p><em>(This post has been edited to only count responses that answered both questions; see <a href="/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/#isso-63">Spencer's criticism in the comments</a>.)</em></p><hr><p id=notes-header>Notes</p><ol class=simple-footnotes><li id=survey-data-on-cis-and-note-1>A <a href="https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/">2016 report</a> by the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles estimated the trans share of the United States population at 0.58%, and (1−0.0058)/0.0058 ≈ 171.4. <a href=#survey-data-on-cis-and-note-1-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li></ol>The Feeling Is Mutual2020-11-20T05:00:00-08:002020-11-20T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-11-20:/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/<blockquote>
<p>She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>She is clearly a villain—but there is such a thing as a sympathetic villain, and it's not as if our sympathy is a finite resource. It seems like she's hurting herself most of all, and it's just because of the brain poison she was fed [...] I can imagine how I might have turned out the same way if I had been born a few years earlier and read the wrong things in the wrong order.</p>
<p>—<a href="https://archive.is/bPPyk">/r/SneerClub reader's commentary on the present author</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>"I can easily imagine being a villain, in a nearby possible world in which my analogue read different books in a different order," is—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8bWbNwiSGbGi9jXPS/epistemic-luck">or should be</a>—a deeply unsettling thought.</p>
<p>In all philosophical strictness, a <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/">physicalist</a> universe such as our own <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PtoQdG7E8MxYJrigu/no-universally-compelling-arguments">isn't going to have some objective morality</a> that all agents are compelled to recognize, but even if there is necessarily <em>some</em> element of subjectivity in that we value sentient life rather than <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/">tiling the universe with diamonds</a>, we usually expect morality to at least <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RBszS2jwGM4oghXW4/the-bedrock-of-morality-arbitrary">not be completely arbitrary</a>: we want to <em>argue</em> that a villain is in the <em>wrong</em> because of <em>reasons</em>, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her.</p>
<p>If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our <em>understanding</em> of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order <em>does</em> seem like an arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we <em>know</em> our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead? How do we break the symmetry?—if the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question.</p>
<p>And that's how I break the symmetry: by acknowledging it when my counterparts don't. I <em>don't</em> think I have fundamentally different <em>values</em> from those whom I <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">happen to be fighting</a>. I think I happen to <em>know</em> some decision-relevant facts and philosophy that they don't, and I can <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence">trace back the causal chain of what I think I know and how I think I know it</a>. They see me as complicit with their oppressors, and mine; I see them as <em>not understanding what I'm trying to do</em>.</p>
<p>I'm trying to construct a map that reflects the territory. If this should entail some risk of self-fulfilling prophecies—if some corner of reality is all twisted up such that any attempt to describe that reality would thereby change it (for the map is <em>part</em> of the territory)—then I want a map of how <em>that</em> process works.</p>
<p>If the one should see this only as service to our oppressors, then I should happily taste the steel of her <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/">beautiful weapons</a>, if she could only tell me in sufficient detail how describing me as the villain <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length">shortens the length of the message needed to describe her observations</a>. I'm <em>listening</em>.</p>Interlude XX2020-11-19T05:00:00-08:002020-11-19T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-11-19:/2020/Nov/interlude-xx/<p>"I'm not <em>done</em> with this incredibly creepy self-disclosure blog post about how the robot-cult's sacred text influenced my self-concept in relation to sex and gender, but maybe I should link you to the draft?" said the honest man. "Because it unblocks our model-sync by describing some of the autobiographical details …</p><p>"I'm not <em>done</em> with this incredibly creepy self-disclosure blog post about how the robot-cult's sacred text influenced my self-concept in relation to sex and gender, but maybe I should link you to the draft?" said the honest man. "Because it unblocks our model-sync by describing some of the autobiographical details that explain why I find the AGP theory so compelling even if <a href="https://unstableontology.com/2020/01/26/on-hiding-the-source-of-knowledge/">I can't prove it</a>. Plus you get a chance to try <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargaining_model_of_war">negotiating</a> with me in case publishing would be an act of probabilistic <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/ldt_intro_phil">timeless</a> genocide against you and yours."</p>
<p>"<em>Genocide?</em>" she asked.</p>
<p>"Because you wouldn't have been allowed to exist if normies believed what I believe. <em>I</em> want you to exist, but—sorry—apparently not <em>more</em> than I want to not participate in cover-ups, times the probability of my whistleblowing successfully reaching normies, times the logical correlation between me and counterfactual whistleblowers far enough into the past to undermine your existence. It ... should be a pretty small number. You won't notice the lost <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/08/measure/">measure</a>."</p>
<p>"No one <em>notices</em>," she spat out contemptuously. "Would you do it if it were larger?"</p>
<p>"Am I risking being counterfactually murdered the moment after I were to say <em>Yes</em>?"</p>
<p>"No California jury would convict me. Does your answer depend on that answer?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>And then they had sex.</p>Nixon on Forbidden Hypotheses2020-11-18T23:05:00-08:002020-11-18T23:05:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-11-18:/2020/Nov/nixon-on-forbidden-hypotheses/<p>I listened with great interest to this segment of a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwXOEFK6Swo">1971 recording of a conversation between President Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan</a> (starting at the 56 second mark). You really wonder more generally what things powerful people think in private that <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html">they can't say</a> in public.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>NIXON: I read …</p></blockquote><p>I listened with great interest to this segment of a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwXOEFK6Swo">1971 recording of a conversation between President Richard Nixon and Daniel Patrick Moynihan</a> (starting at the 56 second mark). You really wonder more generally what things powerful people think in private that <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html">they can't say</a> in public.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>NIXON: I read with great interest your piece from the U.N.—on Herrnstein's piece that I had passed on to you. Let me say first of all, nobody on the staff even knows I read the goddamned article.</p>
<p>MOYNIHAN: Oh, good.</p>
<p>NIXON: And nobody on this staff is going to know anything about it, because I couldn't agree more with you that the Herrnstein stuff and all the rest, this is knowledge—first, no one must think we're thinking about it, and second, if we do find out it's correct, we must never tell anybody.</p>
<p>MOYNIHAN: I'm afraid that's just the case.</p>
<p>NIXON: That's right. Now, let me add a few things, if you can—and you might just make some mental notes about it, or anything you want, so I give you my own views. I've reluctantly concluded, based at least on the evidence presently before me, and I don't base it on any scientific evidence, that what Herrnstein says, and also, what's said earlier by Jensen and so forth, is probably very close to the truth. Now—</p>
<p>MOYNIHAN: I think's that where you'd have to—</p>
<p>NIXON: Now, having said that, then you counter that by saying something that the racists would never agree with, that within groups, there are geniuses—</p>
</blockquote>Two Political Short Stories2020-11-07T23:43:00-08:002020-11-07T23:43:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-11-07:/2020/Nov/two-political-short-stories/<p><em>(a fictional 2017, as imagined in November 2016)</em></p>
<p>I cough nervously to break the awkward silence as we wait for the Chinese ICBM to kill us. "Don't blame me," I say, "I voted for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Libertarian_Party">Gary Johnson</a>!"</p>
<p>Glares all around.</p>
<p>"Aaaand I live in California, and I'm not eligible for <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/3/13478042/third-party-clinton-vote-trading">the …</a></p><p><em>(a fictional 2017, as imagined in November 2016)</em></p>
<p>I cough nervously to break the awkward silence as we wait for the Chinese ICBM to kill us. "Don't blame me," I say, "I voted for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election#Libertarian_Party">Gary Johnson</a>!"</p>
<p>Glares all around.</p>
<p>"Aaaand I live in California, and I'm not eligible for <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/3/13478042/third-party-clinton-vote-trading">the vote-trading hack</a> because I'm not a Clinton supporter," I clarify.</p>
<p>My insufficiently-requited love continues to glare, contempt gleaming in her eyes. "People have been explaining the idea by talking about Clinton supporters in safe states, but the case for vote-trading doesn't depend on that," she says. "As long as you care more about defeating Trump than supporting Johnson, you should still buy a Clinton vote in a swing state in exchange for your California vote; it doesn't matter what you would have done with your California vote otherwise."</p>
<p>"I don't think that works," I say. "The profitability of a deal to each party—uh, no pun intended—has to be calculated relative to the opportunity cost of not making the deal; my counterparty in a proposed trade should be thought of as buying, not a California candidate-of-their-choice vote, but the <em>difference</em> between a California Johnson vote in the no-deal possible world and a California candidate-of-their-choice vote in the possible world with the deal."</p>
<p>"I agree that agents need to consider counterfactual worlds in order to make decisions, but the counterfactuals are properties of <em>the agents' decision algorithms</em>; you can't treat them like they already <em>exist</em>. Think of it this way: if you <em>wish</em> you could have been a Clinton supporter in the absence of vote-trading, in order so that you could take advantage of vote-trading given that vote-trading exists, you can just ... make the corresponding decisions. All you have to offer is your <em>vote</em>; your swing-state counterparty <a href="https://intelligence.org/files/TDT.pdf#section.5">isn't trying to reward or punish people based on what decision theory they use internally</a>."</p>
<p>"What, and leave <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox">the thousand dollars in the second box</a>?" I joke.</p>
<p>Then the missle lands, and we die in a flash of light.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>(a fictional 2027, as imagined in November 2020)</em></p>
<p>My insufficiently-requited love coughs nervously to break the awkward silence as we wait in a crowded holding cell in the Department of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. I continue to glare at her, contempt gleaming in my eyes.</p>
<p>She's about to speak, but gets interrupted by the cell's Alexa. "Shu!" it shrills. "2231 Shu J! Room 101!"</p>
<p>Shu appears to be a young Asian wom—no, I can't see her—their—pronoun badge at this angle. That kind of cisnormative perception, detectable through facial-expression microanalysis, is why I'm here.</p>
<p>Well, that and the blog. On reflection, probably mostly the blog.</p>
<p>"No!" screams Shu. "I know I've benefitted from white privilege, but you can't—" A cold-faced young officer enters, a black man. A decade ago, I wouldn't have made a call on his race—possibly white with a slight tan—but in the current year, I can tell by the black trim on his blue <em>HE/HIM</em> badge. Shu puts up a struggle, but is hopelessly outmatched and easily subdued; men are much stronger than wo—the officer is much stronger than Shu. As they leave, I catch sight of Shu's green <em>THEY/THEM</em> badge.</p>
<p>"So," says my insufficiently-requited love. "What do you suppose is in Room 101?"</p>
<p>I stare at her breasts for a moment before I catch myself and avert my eyes. "I read an effortpost about this on <em>themotte.win.onion</em>," I say, eyes closed, head tilted upwards. "They have a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation">transcranial magnetic stimulation</a> machine. Big electromagnet tweaks your brain to eliminate your implicit bias. Really schway technology, actually: they trained a machine-learning model on MRI scans of people who got perfect <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test">implicit association</a> and <a href="/2020/Feb/cloud-vision/">anti-misgendering</a> scores, so they knew exactly what pulses to send to fix all your biased perceptions with no side effects."</p>
<p>"Oh, that sounds <em>wonderful</em>," she says, as I look back towards her to sneak a peek at her breasts again. "I want to be cured of my implicit bias! But," she moves her head to indicate towards the door where the officer had taken Shu, "why—why do you suppose they were so scared?"</p>
<p>"According to the effortpost ... they <em>knew</em> exactly what pulses to send. Until the interpretability team inspected what the model was really doing. Turns out, the algorithm, the perfect algorithm that achieved the desired effects with no downsides—had learned to give <em>different</em> treatments to a.f.a.b. and a.m.a.b. people. That couldn't be allowed, obviously, so they fixed that, but they didn't manage to replicate the side-effect-freeness of the original model. These days, people go in to Room 101, and they come out with a limp, and slurred speech. Some of them start having nightmares. Some of them forget how to read."</p>
<p>"I ... see."</p>
<p>"Do you remember," I say, "the last time I asked you out on a date? I mean, the <em>last</em> time."</p>
<p>"Strangely, yes," she says. "It was seven years ago. I said—I said that if you really cared for me, you'd do more to prevent Donald Trump from being re-elected ..."</p>
<p>"Saotome-Westlake!" shrills the Alexa. "3578 Saotome-Westlake M! Room 101!"</p>
<p>"I blame you!" I yell at my insufficiently-requited love, as the officer drags me away. "I voted for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Libertarian_Party_nomination">Jo Jorgensen</a>, and <em>I blame you!</em>"</p>Link: "Can WNBA Players Take Down a U.S. Senator?"2020-10-31T14:16:00-07:002020-10-31T14:16:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-10-31:/2020/Oct/link-can-wnba-players-take-down-a-us-senator/<p>From Julie Kliegman for <em>Sports Illustrated</em>, <a href="https://www.si.com/wnba/2020/10/30/wnba-vs-loeffler-daily-cover">a story on the conflict between social-justice-activist WNBA players and Atlanta Dream half-owner Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R–Georgia)</a>. <a href="https://archive.is/GIsvw">(Archived.)</a></p>
<p>The dispute seems to have been sparked by Loeffler's non-support for the Black Lives Matter movement—see also <a href="https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/29732604/inside-wnba-kelly-loeffler-stalemate-give-somebody-go">ESPN's coverage from August</a> <a href="https://archive.is/AifaD">(archived)</a>—but the …</p><p>From Julie Kliegman for <em>Sports Illustrated</em>, <a href="https://www.si.com/wnba/2020/10/30/wnba-vs-loeffler-daily-cover">a story on the conflict between social-justice-activist WNBA players and Atlanta Dream half-owner Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R–Georgia)</a>. <a href="https://archive.is/GIsvw">(Archived.)</a></p>
<p>The dispute seems to have been sparked by Loeffler's non-support for the Black Lives Matter movement—see also <a href="https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/29732604/inside-wnba-kelly-loeffler-stalemate-give-somebody-go">ESPN's coverage from August</a> <a href="https://archive.is/AifaD">(archived)</a>—but the <em>Sports Illustrated</em> reporter places special focus on the more recent development of Loeffler's sponsorship of <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4649/text">Senate Bill 4649</a>, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which, if passed (Kliegman helpfully informs us that it doesn't have a chance), would only allow federal funding of women's sports for programs that define "women" on the basis of <a href="/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/">developmental sex</a>.</p>
<p>I want to react to the "whether or not [sponsoring the bill] was meant as a direct shot at the WNBA" and "Loeffler's pivot to attacking WNBA players and their interests" narration—but what could I possibly say? What kind of partisan would dare accuse Kliegman of the sin of editorializing when the thirty-third graf of the story clearly acknowledges that the science remains unsettled? </p>
<p>The Atlanta Dream are named after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream">Martin Luther King's famous speech about having one</a>. I had one too—something about a globe—<a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#a-dream-about-the-use-of-maps">a map?</a> But I can never remember my dreams, nor follow their false, private logic after awakening into the consensus day. I could predict that sooner or later, the WNBA will have its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurel_Hubbard">Laurel Hubbard</a> or <a href="/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/">Andraya Yearwood</a> moment—but why would that make any difference? Would I deny any other woman her night of glory under the arena's <a href="/2018/Aug/interlude-xii/">five lights</a>?</p>Link: "Wells for Boys"2020-09-19T19:15:00-07:002020-09-19T19:15:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-09-19:/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/<p>Can I just say that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BONhk-hbiXk">this <em>Saturday Night Live</em> sketch</a> is, somehow, <em>on-theme</em>?!</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BONhk-hbiXk" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>Memento Mori2020-08-29T16:45:00-07:002020-08-29T16:45:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-08-29:/2020/Aug/memento-mori/<p><em>(Attention conservation notice: personal thoughts on the passing scene; <a href="/2020/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/">previously</a>, <a href="/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/">previously</a>)</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>But always above you<br>
The idea raises its head<br>
What would I do if the Earth fell apart?<br>
Who would I save, or am I not quite brave enough?</em></p>
<p>—Laura Barrett, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L4yB0LtP0U">"Deception Island Optimists Club"</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Six or sixteen or …</p><p><em>(Attention conservation notice: personal thoughts on the passing scene; <a href="/2020/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/">previously</a>, <a href="/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/">previously</a>)</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>But always above you<br>
The idea raises its head<br>
What would I do if the Earth fell apart?<br>
Who would I save, or am I not quite brave enough?</em></p>
<p>—Laura Barrett, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L4yB0LtP0U">"Deception Island Optimists Club"</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Six or sixteen or twenty-one or forty-seven months later—depending on when you start counting—I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life. I have two more long blog posts to finish—one for the robot-cult blog restating my thesis about the cognitive function of categorization with somewhat more math this time and then using it to give an account of <em>mimicry</em>, and one here doing some robot-cult liturgical commentary plus necessary autobiographical scaffolding—and then I'll be <em>done</em>.</p>
<p>Not done writing. Done <em>grieving</em>. Done with this impotent rage that expects (normative sense) this world to be something other than what I know enough to expect (positive sense). Maybe I'll start learning math again.</p>
<p>Last week, I "e-ttended" the conference associated with this open-source scene I've been into for a while—although I've been so distracted by the Category War that I've landed <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/d1cdb02e4d4">exactly one commit</a> in master in the last 13 months. (I think I'm still allowed to say "in master", although <a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/74127">"whitelist" is out</a>.)</p>
<p>Traditionally (since 2016), this <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/rustconf-2016-travelogue/">has</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/10/some-excuse-for-a-rustconf-2017-travelogue/">been</a> <a href="/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/#tech-conference">my annual occasion</a> to travel up to Portland (the <em>real</em> Portland, and not a cowardly obfuscation) and stay with friend of the blog <a href="/author/sophia/">Sophia</a> (since 2017), but everything is remote this year because of the pandemic.</p>
<p>Only if I'm serious about exiting my grief loop, I need to stop being so profoundly alienated by how thoroughly the finest technical minds of my generation are wholly owned by <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#blue-egregore">Blue Egregore</a>. <em>I fear the successor ideology</em>—the righteous glee with which they proclaim that everything is political, that anyone with reservations about the Code of Conduct is <em>ipso facto</em> a bigot, how empathy is as important if not more so than technical excellence ...</p>
<p>I can't even think of them as enemies. We're the <em>same people</em>. I was born in 1987 and grew up in California with the same <a href="/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/">beautiful moral ideal</a> as everyone else. I just—stopped receiving updates a few years back. From their perspective, an unpatched copy of Social Liberalism 2009 must look hopelessly out-of-date with the Current Year's nexus of <a href="https://palladiummag.com/2019/08/05/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free-speech/">ideological coordination</a>, which everyone wants to be <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/corrigibility">corrigible</a> to.</p>
<p>Or maybe I'm not <em>even</em> running unpatched Liberalism 2009? I'm still loyal to the beauti—to <em>my interpretation of</em> the beautiful moral ideal. But I've done a lot of off-curriculum reading—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Usually_Begins_with_Ayn_Rand">it usually begins with Ayn Rand</a>, but it <a href="/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/">gets</a> <a href="/2017/Jan/and-yet-none-more-blameable/#goldberg">much</a> <a href="/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/">worse</a>. It ... leaves a mark. It's <em>supposed to</em> leave a mark on the world-model without touching the utility function. But how do you explain that to anyone outside of your robot cult?</p>
<p>One of the remote conference talks was about using our software for computational biology. There was something I wanted to say in the Discord channel, related to how I might want to redirect my energies after I'm done grieving. I typed it out in my Emacs <code>*scratch*</code> buffer, but, after weighing the risks for a few seconds, deleted a parenthetical at the end.</p>
<p>What I posted was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>really excited to hear about applying tech skills to biology; my current insurance dayjob is not terribly inspiring, and I've been wondering if I should put effort into making more of an impact with my career</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The parenthetical I deleted was:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(<em>e.g.</em> if someone in the world is working on <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection">https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection</a> and needs programmers)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It probably wouldn't have mattered either way, with so many messages flying by in the chat. In some ways, Blue Egregore is less like an ideology and more like a regular expression filter: you can get surprisingly far into discussing the actual substance of ideas as long as no one <em>says a bad word</em> like "eugenics".</p>
<p><a id="if-we-even-have-enough-time"></a>—if we even have enough <em>time</em> for things like embryo selection to help, if AI research somehow keeps plodding along <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/antisingularity/">even as everything <em>else</em> falls apart</a>. The <a href="https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3">GPT-3 demos</a> have been tickling my neuroticism. Sure, it's "just" a language model, doing nothing more but predicting the next token of human-generated text. But <a href="https://bmk.sh/2020/08/17/Building-AGI-Using-Language-Models/">you can do a lot with language</a>. As <em>disgusted</em> as I am with my robot cult as presently constituted, the <em>argument</em> for why you should fear the coming robot apocalypse in which all will be consumed in a cloud of tiny molecular paperclips, still looks solid. But I had always thought of it as a long-term thing—this unspoken sense of, okay, we're probably all going to die, but that'll probably be in, like, 2060 or whatever. People freaking out about it coming <em>soon</em>-soon are probably just <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult">following the gradient into</a> being <a href="https://unstableontology.com/2019/07/11/the-ai-timelines-scam/">a doomsday cult</a>. Now the threat, <a href="https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/">and the uncertainty around it</a>, feel more real—like maybe we'll all die in 2035 instead of 2060.</p>
<p>At some point, I should write a post on the causes and consequences of the psychological traits of fictional characters not matching the real-life distributions by demographic. <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Lower_Decks">The new <em>Star Trek</em> cartoon</a> is not very good, but I'm obligated to enjoy it anyway out of brand loyalty. One of the main characters, Ens. Beckett Mariner, is <a href="https://youtu.be/64obsPsXxkE?t=45">brash and boisterous and dominant</a>—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CVJGy0Do5I">friendly, but in a way</a> that makes it clear that she's <em>on top</em>. If you've seen <em>Rick and Morty</em>, her relationship with Ens. Brad Boimler has the Rick and Morty dynamic, with Mariner as Rick. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_McMahan">Series creator</a> Mike McMahan actually worked on <em>Rick and Morty</em>, so it likely <em>is</em> the same dynamic, not just superficially, but generated by the same algorithm in McMahan's head.)</p>
<p>Overall, I'm left with this uncanny feeling that Mariner is ... not drawn from the (straight) female distribution?—like she's a jockish teenage boy <a href="https://youtu.be/kSLJriaOumA?t=28">StyleGANed</a> into a cute mulatto woman's body. That, given the Federation's established <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cosmetic_surgery">proficiency with cosmetic surgery</a>, I'm almost <em>forced</em> to formulate the headcanon that she's an AGP trans woman. (The name "Beckett" doesn't help, either. Maybe I should expand this theory into a full post and try to pick up some readers from <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/">/r/DaystromInstitute</a>, but maybe that would just get me banned.)</p>
<p>I wish I knew <em>in more detail</em> what my brain thinks it's picking up on here? (I could always be wrong.) It's important that I use the word <em>distribution</em> everywhere; I'm at least definitely not being one of those <em>statistically-illiterate</em> sexists. Most men <em>also</em> don't have that kind or degree of boisterous dominance; my surprise is a matter of ratios in the right tail.</p>
<p>I wish there was some way I could get a chance to explain to all <em>my people</em> still under the Egregore's control, what <em>should</em> be common knowledge too obvious to mention—that Bayesian <em>surprise</em> is not moral <em>disapproval</em>. Beckett Mariner <em>deserves to exist</em>. (And, incidentally, I deserve the chance to <em>be</em> her.) But I think the way you realistically <em>get</em> starships and full-body StyleGAN—and survive—is going to require an uncompromising focus on the kind of technical excellence that can explain in mathematical detail what black-box abstractions like "politics" and "empathy" are even supposed to <em>mean</em>—an excellence that <em>doesn't fit past the regex filter</em>.</p>
<p>But I don't expect to live to get the chance.</p>Yarvin on Less Wrong2020-08-28T23:10:00-07:002020-08-28T23:10:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-08-28:/2020/Aug/yarvin-on-less-wrong/<p>I listened with interest to this segment (starting at the 3 hour, 23 minutes, 48 seconds mark) from <a href="https://therightstuff.biz/2020/08/04/hyperpodcastism-moldbug/"><em>Hyperpodcastism</em>'s interview with Curtis Yarvin</a> (loose transcription elides some amount of "um", "you know", "like", "sort of", repetition, false starts, <em>&c.</em>)—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>INTERVIEWER: More lightning round takes on what became of <em>Less …</em></p></blockquote><p>I listened with interest to this segment (starting at the 3 hour, 23 minutes, 48 seconds mark) from <a href="https://therightstuff.biz/2020/08/04/hyperpodcastism-moldbug/"><em>Hyperpodcastism</em>'s interview with Curtis Yarvin</a> (loose transcription elides some amount of "um", "you know", "like", "sort of", repetition, false starts, <em>&c.</em>)—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>INTERVIEWER: More lightning round takes on what became of <em>Less Wrong</em>?</p>
<p>YARVIN: Were you ever a rationalist? Are you now, or have you ever been a rationalist, I should say?</p>
<p>INTERVIEWER: I was friends with them. They were always encouraging me to jump right in, but I was happy being a peripheral. </p>
<p>YARVIN: I respect those people, but there's a sort of Peter principle to them there. I always wanted to troll them with my Bayesian analysis of Barack Obama's birth certificate. The problem is—adopting that name—no one should ever adopt a self-aggrandizing name for anything that they do. It kills you instantly. It's instantly pretentious. Not only does it not fool anyone else, its main effect is to fool yourself, and so when you compare being a rationalist like Eliezer Yudkowsky to being someone like Socrates, who was like, "My wisdom is knowing what I don't know", I see on one hand wisdom, and I see on the other hand arrogance. And when I choose between wisdom and arrogance, it's obvious which I want to choose. Eliezer always reminded me—I've only met him a few times, never talked much, but—it's funny, the person that Eliezer always reminded me of was—do you know who <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi">Sabbatai Zevi</a> was?</p>
<p>INTERVIEWER: The Jewish historical figure, the one who was supposed to be the messiah, and then converted to Islam—</p>
<p>YARVIN: Exactly, exactly. If you look at woodcuts of Sabbatai Zevi, it's Eliezer Yudkowsky; it's the same person. There's a lot of inbreeding going on there. More than that, I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that in the same position, Eliezer Yudkowsky would also convert to Islam.</p>
<p>INTERVIEWER: I could actually see that. That is a fire take, but I can see it.</p>
<p>YARVIN: It's a hot take, I got to say. I hope I don't get in trouble for it. But I know he would. And the thing is, ultimately, the only reason to be a rationalist, or the only reason for there to be such a thing as a rationalist—until you acknowledge that the major distortions in the status quo—which otherwise, if you weren't a rationalist, you would just believe in—until you acknowledge that the major disortions in the status quo have a fundamentally ideological source. Essentially, if you are a rationalist, the only thing that you should care about is defeating communism. Because that is the source of—call it what you will, you can call it wokism if you want—that is the source of that tradition, or not even that tradition, that way of thinking, that sense of being addicted to importance and power, which is what we really mean by this thing—is really the source of all of these biases. So if you're truly a rationalist, dedicated to overcoming bias, basically all the biases that are not ideological in origin are just weird random stupid shit that people believe in for weird random reasons, and then there's this elephant in the room, which is this massively distorting ideology. So unless you're focusing on the elephant, you're basically not being a rationalist at all. It's like Willie Sutton said: why do you rob banks? It's where the money is. If you're a rationalist, why do you have to be a right-winger? That's where the lies are. That's where the important lies are. Not some peasant bullshit about evolution or whatever that's completely unimportant. The lies of power are the lies that matter. And so if you duck this thing, you're being a rationalist who isn't actually rational. At that point, <em>allahu akbar</em>. You haven't actually escaped at all, until you're escaping from the thing you actually need to escape from. So that's basically my take on the rationalists. They're brave, but they're not too brave.</p>
<p>INTERVIEWER: Diet brave.</p>
<p>YARVIN: Diet brave. And conservatives are diet brave in a completely different sort of way. Look, if you really wanted to be just a shill, you'd be just a shill. There is honor in you. There's some purpose, there's some sense of something different there. You're not just a shill. But you're still diet brave.</p>
</blockquote>Interlude XIX2020-07-16T21:00:00-07:002020-07-16T21:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-07-16:/2020/Jul/interlude-xvix/<p><em>(16 July 2017)</em></p>
<p>"Tomorrow! No coffee, no Facebook, no food—well, maybe some Soylent because the medication for my birth defect says to take with food, some kind of bioavailability thing—no low-quality internet reading, no TV ... <em>just writing!</em> The demons that haunt us are only powerful to the extent …</p><p><em>(16 July 2017)</em></p>
<p>"Tomorrow! No coffee, no Facebook, no food—well, maybe some Soylent because the medication for my birth defect says to take with food, some kind of bioavailability thing—no low-quality internet reading, no TV ... <em>just writing!</em> The demons that haunt us are only powerful to the extent that we refuse to look—show them the true meaning of 'writer's block' by looking 'em in the eye and hitting 'em in the face with a brick!"</p>
<p>"Wait, you have a birth defect?"</p>
<p>"Defective X chromosome. And another thing—"</p>
<p>"Also, how often do these grandiose vows of yours actually come true?"</p>
<p>"Induction isn't real!"</p>Oceans Rise, Empires Fall2020-06-30T23:15:00-07:002020-06-30T23:15:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-06-30:/2020/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/<p><em>(Attention conservation notice: passing thoughts on the present scene)</em></p>
<p>Okay, three years lat—three <em>months</em>, three <em>months</em> and one week later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have <a href="/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/">suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response</a>. I was pointing at <em>something</em> real with …</p><p><em>(Attention conservation notice: passing thoughts on the present scene)</em></p>
<p>Okay, three years lat—three <em>months</em>, three <em>months</em> and one week later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have <a href="/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/">suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response</a>. I was pointing at <em>something</em> real with that post—there is <em>some</em> subgraph of the discourse network of the world that's interested in doing serious cognition to minimize horrible suffocation deaths, but which is definitively <em>not</em> interested in ...</p>
<p>But it's a <em>small</em> subgraph. It is written that every improvement is necessarily a change, but not every change is an improvement. When the center of collective narrative gravity shifts, that <em>could</em> be the homing device of our <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/">beautiful weapons</a> converging on the needle of Truth in the haystack of thought, but it could just be the blind thrashing of Fashion.</p>
<p>The Smart Subgraph <a href="https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/">sounding the alarm</a> might have been an input into authorities calling for a half-measured lockdown ("lockdown")—which was only enough to push <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/covid-19-4-30-stuck-in-limbo/">slightly below 1</a>. That might have bought us time if we had any <a href="https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2">live players</a> who could do the test–trace–quarantine scurrying we fantasized about, but it doesn't look like that's a thing.</p>
<p>The lockdown ("lockdown") became a distinguishing tribal value for Blue Egregore, with hick anti-lockdown protesters an object of scorn: <a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/4/25/21234774/coronavirus-covid-19-protest-anti-lockdown">"The whiteness of anti-lockdown protests"</a>, proclaimed one <em>Vox</em> headline on 25 April, "How ignorance, privilege, and anti-black racism is driving white protesters to risk their lives." The "risking their lives" characterization of that piece's subhead makes an interesting contrast to what similar voices would say about the George Floyd protests little more than a month later: <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2020/06/protests-coronavirus-pandemic-public-health-racism.html">"Public Health Experts Say the Pandemic Is Exactly Why Protests Must Continue"</a> (!!) proclaimed <em>Slate</em> on 2 June.</p>
<p>Is it wrong for me to say "similar voices"? I <em>know</em> that Maia Niguel Hoskin (author of the <em>Vox</em> piece) and Shannon Palus (author of the <em>Slate</em> piece) are different people, and that reporters often have no control over what headline gets pasted on top their work. And yet somehow some notion of "the tendency of thought exemplified by <em>Vox</em> and <em>Slate</em>"—or, more daringly, Blue Egregore—seems ... well, you know, useful for compressing the length of the message needed to describe my observations?</p>
<p>(You can accuse me of beating a dead horse (family <em>Equidae</em>, order <em>Perissodactyla</em>, class <em>Mammalia</em>, phylum <em>Chordata</em>), but it's theraputic: unable to make sense of having lost the Category War <em>in my own robot cult</em>—because it <em>in fact</em> makes no sense—the rage and grief must be decomposed into obsessive and repetitive pedantry, like a tic. It's not a crime, but even if it were, you should know to <em>never talk to cops</em>, and it's definitely mental illness, but <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">I can tell you</a> to <em>never talk to psychiatrists</em>.)</p>
<p>I read a lot of things on the internet by many authors—not just officially "published" articles, but comments and Tweets, too. Every comment is unique, but no comment is <em>maximally</em> unique—which is to say, there's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_information"><em>mutual</em> information</a> between comments. Seeing one "protests are a Bad public health threat" comment in late April makes me <em>less surprised</em> to see more such by authors I had already tagged as "similar"—and seeing a "protests are Good as a countermeasure to the public health threat of white supremacy" comment in early June makes me less surprised to see more such from similar authors, perhaps even some of the <em>same</em> authors who said protests were a public health threat in April. The stronger the correlation is, the more tempting it is to posit Blue Egregore's existence as an <em>entity</em> that persists over time, albeit probably less cohesively than Maia Niguel Hoskin.</p>
<p>I almost wish—emphasis on <em>almost</em>—that I had something substantive to say about racial oppression and police brutality. I don't doubt that these things are very real and very bad, but they belong to another world from which my privilege protects me, and the intra-elite power struggle in <em>my</em> world that <em>purports</em> to refer to these things <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/simulacra-subjectivity/">mostly serves</a> <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/06/15/simulacra-and-covid-19/">other functions</a>. Black lives actually matter, and we should literally arrest the cops that literally killed Breonna Taylor, but I'm mostly preoccupied with the side-effects in my world—<em>I fear the successor ideology!</em></p>
<p>There's been so much news I could write about—I could regale you with <em>takes</em> about <a href="https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx"><code>origin/master</code></a> or J. K. Rowling (smart and brave, but <a href="https://archive.is/FwlQn">deleting the praise for Stephen King</a> was awfully petty), <a href="https://www.wnpr.org/post/us-government-wont-recognize-connecticut-transgender-athletes-right-compete-females">Connecticut doubling down</a> <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/">(previously)</a>, the <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/nooses-oakland-park-exercise-aids-man-71314468">Oakland exercise ropes</a>, David Shor, standardized tests, Steve Hsu, the R. A. Fisher lecture, my robot cult going to war with the <em>New York Times</em>, <a href="https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/YzN4LkMHs7k/UUv_ApNaBgAJ">political fundraising on <em>golang.org</em></a> ... but I have too many competing writing priorities at the moment. More later. Stay subscribed—and stay safe!</p>Teleology2020-04-29T05:00:00-07:002020-04-29T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-04-29:/2020/Apr/teleology/<p>"I mean, if that explanation actually makes you feel happier, then fine."</p>
<p>"Feeling happier isn't what explanations are for. Explanations are for <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">predicting our observations</a>.</p>
<p>"Emotions, too, are functional: happiness measures whether things in your life are going well or going poorly, but does not <em>constitute</em> things going well, much …</p><p>"I mean, if that explanation actually makes you feel happier, then fine."</p>
<p>"Feeling happier isn't what explanations are for. Explanations are for <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">predicting our observations</a>.</p>
<p>"Emotions, too, are functional: happiness measures whether things in your life are going well or going poorly, but does not <em>constitute</em> things going well, much as a high reading on a thermometer measures heat as 'temperature' without itself <em>being</em> heat.</p>
<p>"If the explanation that predicts your observations makes you unhappy, then the explanation—and the unhappiness—are functioning as designed."</p>Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class2020-04-28T10:22:00-07:002020-04-28T10:22:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-04-28:/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/<p><a href="https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/">This is a pretty good book</a> about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other, particularly differences in <em>cognitive repertoires</em> (Murray's choice of phrase for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). In <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">my last book review</a>, I mentioned that I had …</p><p><a href="https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/charles-murray/human-diversity/9781538744000/">This is a pretty good book</a> about things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other, particularly differences in <em>cognitive repertoires</em> (Murray's choice of phrase for shaving nine syllables off "personality, abilities, and social behavior"). In <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">my last book review</a>, I mentioned that I had been thinking about broadening the topic scope of this blog, and this book review seems like an okay place to start!</p>
<p>Honestly, I feel like I already knew most of this stuff?—sex differences in particular are kind of <em>my bag</em>—but many of the details were new to me, and it's nice to have it all bundled together in a paper book with lots of citations that I can chase down later when I'm skeptical or want more details about a specific thing! The main text is littered with pleonastic constructions like "The first author was Jane Thisand-Such" (when discussing the results of a multi-author paper) or "Details are given in the note<sup>[n]</sup>", which feel clunky to read, but are <em>so much better</em> than the all-too-common alternative of authors <em>not</em> "showing their work".</p>
<p>In the first part of this blog post, I'm going to summarize what I learned from (or thought about, or was reminded of by) <em>Human Diversity</em>, but it would be kind of unhealthy for you to rely too much on tertiary blog-post summaries of secondary semi-grown-up-book literature summaries, so if these topics happen to strike your scientific curiosity, you should probably skip this post and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y82KNS1/">go buy the source material</a>—or maybe even a grown-up textbook!</p>
<p>The second part of this blog post is irrelevant.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Human Diversity</em> is divided into three parts corresponding to the topics in the subtitle! (Plus another part if you want some wrapping-up commentary from Murray.) So the first part is about things we know about some ways in which female people and male people are different from each other!</p>
<p>The first (short) chapter is mostly about explaining <a href="https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cohen%27s_d">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_size">effect sizes</a>, which I think are solving a very important problem! When people say "Men are taller than women" you know they don't mean <em>all</em> men are taller than <em>all</em> women (because you know that they know that that's obviously not true), but that just raises the question of what they <em>do</em> mean. Saying they mean it "generally", "on average", or "statistically" doesn't really solve the problem, because that covers everything between-but-not-including "No difference" to "Yes, literally all women and all men". Cohen's <em>d</em>—the difference between two groups' means in terms of their pooled standard deviation—lets us give a <em>quantitative</em> answer to <em>how much</em> men are taller than women: I've seen reports of <em>d</em> ≈ 1.4–1.7 depending on the source, a lot smaller than the sex difference in murder rates (<em>d</em> ≈ 2.5), but much bigger than the difference in verbal skills (<em>d</em> ≈ 0.3, favoring women).</p>
<p>Once you have a quantitative effect size, then you can <a href="https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/">visualize the overlapping distributions</a>, and the question of whether the reality of the data should be summarized in English as a "large difference" or a "small difference" becomes <em>much less interesting</em>, bordering on meaningless.</p>
<p>Murray also addresses the issue of aggregating effect sizes—something <a href="/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#high-dimensional-social-science-and-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes">I've been meaning to get around to blogging about</a> more exhaustively in this context of group differences (although at least, um, my favorite author on <em>Less Wrong</em> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy">covered it in the purely abstract setting</a>): small effect sizes in any single measurement (whatever "small" means) can amount to a <em>big</em> difference when you're considering many measurements at once. That's how people can <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf">distinguish female and male faces at 96% accuracy</a>, even though there's no single measurement (like "eye width" or "nose height") offers that much predictive power.</p>
<p>Subsequent chapters address sex differences in personality, cognition, interests, and the brain. It turns out that women are more warm, empathetic, æsthetically discerning, and cooperative than men are! They're also more into the Conventional, Artistic, and Social dimensions of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Codes">Holland occupational-interests model</a>.</p>
<p>You might think that this is all due to socialization, but then it's hard to explain why the same differences show up in different cultures—and why (counterintuitively) the differences seem <em>larger</em> in richer, more feminist countries. (Although as evolutionary anthropologist <a href="https://traditionsofconflict.com/">William Buckner</a> points out in <a href="https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1228124441944584192">his</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1228860328483491840">social-media</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Evolving_Moloch/status/1228947493309698050">criticism</a> of <em>Human Diversity</em>, <a href="https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/05/weird">W.E.I.R.D.</a> samples from different countries aren't capturing the full range of human cultures.) You might think that the "larger differences in rich countries" result is an artifact: maybe people in less-feminist countries implicitly make within-sex comparisons when answering personality questions (<em>e.g.</em>, "I'm competitive <em>for a woman</em>") whereas people in more-feminist countries use a less sexist standard of comparison, construing ratings as compared to people-in-general. Murray points out that this explanation still posits the existence of large sex differences in rich countries (while explaining away the unexpected cross-cultural difference-in-differences). Another possibility is that sexual dimorphism <em>in general</em> increases with wealth, including, <em>e.g.</em>, in height and blood pressure, not just in personality. (I notice that this is consilient with the view that <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race">agriculture was a mistake</a> that suppresses humans' natural tendencies, and that people <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/10/divide-forager-v-farmer.html">revert to forager-like lifestyles</a> <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/08/forager-v-farmer-elaborated.html">in many ways</a> as the riches of the industrial revolution let them afford it.)</p>
<p>Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/alpha-gamma-phi/">men are better at visuospatial skills</a>. The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that general intelligence <a href="/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf">"masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"</a>: people's overall skill in using tools from the metaphorical mental toolbox leads to underestimates of differences in toolkits (that is, nonmetaphorically, the effect sizes of sex differences in specific mental abilities), which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is <em>super gratifying</em> to me personally, because <a href="/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/">I independently had a very similar idea a few months back</a>—it's <em>super validating</em> as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track!</p>
<p><a id="ancestries"></a>The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as <a href="/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf">Li <em>et al.</em> 2008</a>) that when you throw clustering and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction">dimensionality-reduction</a> algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".</p>
<p>Ask the computer to assume that an individual's ancestry came from <em>K</em> fictive ancestral populations where <em>K</em> := 2, and it'll infer that sub-Saharan Africans are descended entirely from one, East Asians and some native Americans are descended entirely from the other, and everyone else is an admixture. But if you set <em>K</em> := 3, populations from Europe and the near East (which were construed as admixtures in the <em>K</em> := 2 model) split off as a new inferred population cluster. And so on.</p>
<p>These ancestry groupings <em>are</em> a "construct" in the sense that the groupings aren't "ordained by God"—the algorithm can find <em>K</em> groupings for your choice of <em>K</em>—but <em>where</em> it <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">draws those category boundaries</a> is a function of the data. The construct is doing <em>cognitive work</em>, concisely summarizing statistical regularities in the dataset (which is <em>too large</em> for humans to hold in their heads all at once): a map that reflects a territory.</p>
<p>Twentieth-century theorists like Fisher and Haldane and whatshisface-the-guinea-pig-guy had already figured out a lot about how evolution works (stuff like, a mutation that confers a fitness advantage of <em>s</em> has a probability of about 2<em>s</em> of sweeping to fixation), but a lot of hypotheses about recent human evolution weren't easy to test or even formulate until the genome was sequenced!</p>
<p><a id="standing-variation"></a>You might think that there wasn't enough <em>time</em> in the 2–5k generations since we came forth out of Africa for much human evolution to take place: a new mutation needs to confer an unusually large benefit to sweep to fixation that fast. But what if you didn't actually need any new mutations? Natural selection on polygenic traits can also act on "standing variation": variation <em>already</em> present in the population that was mostly neutral in previous environments, but is fitness-relevant to new selection pressures. The rapid response to selective breeding observed in domesticated plants and animals mostly doesn't depend on new mutations.</p>
<p>Another mechanism of recent human evolution is <em>introgression</em>: early humans interbred with our Neanderthal and Denisovan "cousins", giving our lineage the chance to "steal" all their good alleles! In contrast to new mutations, which usually die out even when they're beneficial (that 2<em>s</em> rule again), alleles "flowing" from another population keep getting reintroduced, giving them more chances to sweep!</p>
<p>Population differences are important when working with genome-wide association studies, because a model "trained on" one population won't perform as well against the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training,_validation,_and_test_sets">"test set"</a> of a different population. Suppose you do a big study and find a bunch of SNPs that correlate with a trait, like schizophrenia or liking opera. The frequencies of those SNPs for two populations from the same continent (like Japanese and Chinese) will hugely correlate (Pearson's <em>r</em> ≈ 0.97), but for more genetically-distant populations from different continents, the correlation will still be big but not huge (like <em>r</em> ≈ 0.8 or whatever).</p>
<p>What do these differences in SNP frequencies mean in practice?? We ... don't know yet. At least some population differences are fairly well-understood: I'd tell you about sickle-cell and lactase persistence, except <a href="/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/">then I would have to scream</a>. There are some cases where we see populations independently evolve different adaptations that solve the same problem: <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/104/suppl_1/8655.long">people living on the plateaus of both Tibet and Peru have both adapted to high altitudes</a>, but the Tibetans did it by breathing faster and the Peruvians did it with more hemoglobin!</p>
<p>Sorry, "the Tibetans did it with ..." is sloppy phrasing on my part; what I actually mean is that the Tibetans who weren't genetically predisposed to breathe faster were more likely to die without leaving children behind. That's how evolution works!</p>
<p><a id="ace-model"></a>The third part of the book is about genetic influences on class structure! Untangling the true causes of human variation is a really hard technical philosophy problem, but behavioral geneticists have at least gotten started with their simple <em>ACE</em> model. It works like this: first, assume (that is, "pretend") that the genetic variation for a trait is <em>additive</em> (if you have the appropriate SNP, you get more of the trait), rather than exhibiting <em>epistasis</em> (where the effects of different loci interfere with each other) or Mendelian <em>dominance</em> (where the presence of just one copy of an allele (of two) determines the phenotype, and it doesn't matter whether you heterozygously have a different allele as your second version of that gene). Then we pretend that we can partition the variance in phenotypes as the sum of the "additive" genetic variance <em>A</em>, plus the environmental variance "common" within a family <em>C</em>, plus "everything else" (including measurement "error" and the not-shared-within-families "environment") <em>E</em>. Briefly (albeit at the risk of being <em>cliché</em>): nature, nurture, and <em>noise</em>.</p>
<p><a id="twin-studies"></a>Then we can estimate the sizes of the <em>A</em>, <em>C</em>, and <em>E</em> components by studying fraternal and identical twins. (If you hear people talking about "twin studies", this is what they mean—<em>not</em> case studies of identical twins raised apart, which <em>are</em> really cool but don't happen very often.) Both kinds of twins have the same family environment <em>C</em> at the same time (parents, socioeconomic status, schools, <em>&c.</em>), but identical twins are twice as genetically related to each other as fraternal twins, so the extent to which the identical twins are more similar is going to pretty much be because of their genes. "Pretty much" in the sense that while there are ways in which the assumptions of the model aren't quite true (assortative mating makes fraternal twins more similar in the ways their parents were <em>already</em> similar before mating, identical twins might get treated more similarly by "the environment" on account of their appearance), Murray assures us that the experts assure us that the <em>quantitative</em> effect of these deviations are probably pretty small!</p>
<p>Anyway, it turns out that the effect of the shared environment <em>C</em> for most outcomes is smaller than most people intuitively expect—actually close to zero for personality and adult intelligence specifically! Sometimes sloppy popularizers summarize this as "parenting doesn't matter" in full generality, but it depends on the trait or outcome you're measuring: for example, the shared environment component gets up to 25% for years-of-schooling ("educational attainment") and 36% for "basic interpersonal interactions." <em>Culture</em> obviously exists, but for underlying psychological traits, the part of the environment that matters is mostly not shared by siblings in the same family—not the part of the environment we know how to control. Thus, a lot of economic and class stratification actually ends up being along genetic lines: the nepotism of family wealth can buy opportunities and second chances, but it doesn't actually live your life for you.</p>
<p><a id="heritability-caveats"></a>It's important not to overinterpret the heritability results; there are a bunch of standard caveats that go here that everyone's treatment of the topic needs to include! Heritability is about the <em>variance</em> in phenotypes that can be predicted by <em>variance</em> in genes. This is <em>not</em> the same concept as "controlled by genes." To see this, notice that the trait "number of heads" has a heritability of zero because the variance is zero: all living people have exactly one head. (Siamese twins are two people.) Heritability estimates are also necessarily bound to a particular population in a particular place and time, which can face constraints shaped solely by the environment. If you plant half of a batch of seeds in the shade and half in the sun, the variance in the heights of the resulting plants will be associated with variance in genes <em>within</em> each group, but the difference <em>between</em> the groups is solely determined by the sunniness of their environments. Likewise, in a Society with a cruel caste system under which children with red hair are denied internet access, part of the heritability of intellectual achievement is going to come from alleles that code for red hair. Even though (<em>ex hypothesi</em>) redheads have the same inherent intellectual potential as everyone else, the heritability computation can't see into worlds that are not our own, which might have vastly different gene–environment correlations.</p>
<p>(I speculate that heritability calculations being so Society-bound might help make sense of the "small role of the shared environment" results that many still balk at. If the population you're studying goes to public schools—or schools at all, as contrasted to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling">other ways of living and learning</a>—that could suppress a lot of the variance that might otherwise occur in families.)</p>
<p>Old-timey geneticists used to think that they would find small number of "genes for" something, but it turns out that we live in an omnigenetic, pleiotropic world where lots and lots of SNPs each exert a tiny effect on potentially lots and lots of things. I feel like this probably <em>shouldn't</em> have been surprising (genes code for amino-acid sequences, variation in what proteins get made from those amino-acid sequences is going to affect high-level behaviors, but high-level behaviors involve <em>lots</em> of proteins in a super-complicated unpredictable way), but I guess it was.</p>
<p>Murray's penultimate chapter summarizes the state of a debate between a "Robert Plomin school" and an "Eric Turkheimer school" on the impact and import of polygenic scores, where we tally up all the SNPs someone has that are associated with a trait of interest.</p>
<p>The starry-eyed view epitomized by Plomin says that polygenic scores are <em>super great</em> and everyone <em>and <a href="/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/">her</a> dog</em> should be excited about them: they're causal in only one direction (the trait can't cause the score) and they let us assess risks in individuals before they happen. Clinical psychology will enter a new era of "positive genomics", where we understand how to work with the underlying dimensions along which people vary (including positively), rather than focusing on treating "diagnoses" that people allegedly "have".</p>
<p>The curmudgeonly view epitomized by Turkheimer says that Science is about understanding the <em>causal structure</em> of phenomena, and that polygenic scores don't fucking tell us anything. <a href="http://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/the-ubiquity-problem-for-group-differences-in-behavior/">Marital status is heritable <em>in the same way</em> that intelligence is heritable</a>, not because there are "divorce genes" in any meaningful biological sense, but because of a "universal, nonspecific genetic pull on everything": on average, people with more similar genes will make more similar proteins from those similar genes, and therefore end up with more similar phenotypes that interact with the environment in a more similar way, and <em>eventually</em> (the causality flowing "upwards" through many hierarchical levels of organization) this shows up in the divorce statistics of a particular Society in a particular place and time. But this is opaque and banal; the real work of Science is in figuring out what all the particular gene variations actually <em>do</em>.</p>
<p>Notably, Plomin and Turkheimer aren't actually disagreeing here: it's a difference in emphasis rather than facts. Polygenic scores <em>don't</em> explain mechanisms—but might they end up being useful, and used, anyway? Murray's vision of social science is content to make predictions and "explain variance" while remaining ignorant of ultimate causality. (Murray compares polygenic scores to "economic indexes predicting GDP growth", which is not necessarily a reassuring analogy to those who doubt how much of GDP represents real production rather than the "exhaust heat" of zero-sum contests in an environment of <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/there-is-a-war/">manufactured scarcity</a> and <a href="https://write.as/harold-lee/the-sliding-scale-of-bullshit-jobs">artificial demand</a>.) Meanwhile, my cursory understanding (while kicking myself for <a href="/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#daphne-koller-and-the-methods"><em>still</em></a> not having put in the hours to get much farther into <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models"><em>Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques</em></a>) was that you <em>need</em> to understand causality in order to predict what interventions will have what effects: variance in rain may be statistically "explained by" variance in mud puddles, but you can't make it rain by turning the hose on. Maybe our feeble state of knowledge is <em>why</em> we don't know how to find reliable large-effect environmental interventions that still yet might exist in the vastness of the space of possible interventions.</p>
<p>There are also some appendices at the back of the book! Appendix 1 (reproduced from, um, one of Murray's earlier books with a coauthor) explains some basic statistics concepts. Appendix 2 ("Sexual Dimorphism in Humans") goes over the prevalence of intersex conditions and gays, and then—so much for this post broadening the <a href="/tag/two-type-taxonomy/">topic scope of this blog</a>—transgender typology! Murray presents the Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence–Littman view as fact, which I think is basically <em>correct</em>, but a more comprehensive treatment (which I concede may be too much too hope for from a mere Appendix) would have at least <em>mentioned</em> alternative views (<a href="https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intrinsic_Inclinations_Model">Serano</a>? <a href="/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf">Veale</a>?), if only to explain <em>why</em> they're worth dismissing. (Contrast to the eight pages in the main text explaining why "But, but, epigenetics!" is worth dismissing.) Then Appendix 3 ("Sex Differences in Brain Volumes and Variance") has tables of brain-size data, and an explanation of the greater-male-variance hypothesis. Cool!</p>
<hr>
<p>... and that's the book review that I would <em>prefer</em> to write. A science review of a science book, for science nerds: the kind of thing that would have no reason to draw your attention if you're not <em>genuinely interested</em> in Mahanalobis <em>D</em> effect sizes or adaptive introgression or Falconer's formulas, for their own sake, or (better) for the sake of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_message_length">compressing the length of the message needed to encode your observations</a>.</p>
<p>But that's not why you're reading this. That's not why Murray wrote the book. That's not even why <em>I'm</em> writing this. We should hope—emphasis on the <em>should</em>—for a discipline of Actual Social Science, whose practitioners strive to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with the same passionately dispassionate objectivity they might bring to the study of beetles, or algebraic topology—or that an alien superintelligence might bring to the study of humans.</p>
<p>We do not have a discipline of Actual Social Science. Possibly because we're not smart enough to do it, but perhaps more so because we're not smart enough to <em>want</em> to do it. No one has an incentive to lie about the homotopy groups of an <em>n</em>-sphere. If you're asking questions about homotopy groups <em>at all</em>, you almost certainly care about getting <em>the right answer for the right reasons</em>. At most, you might be biased towards believing your own conjectures in the optimistic hope of achieving eternal algebraic-topology fame and glory, like Ruth Lawrence. But nothing about algebraic topology is going to be <a href="/2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/"><em>morally threatening</em></a> in a way that will leave you fearing that your ideological enemies have seized control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head, or sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil.</p>
<p>Okay, maybe that was a bad example; topology in general really is the kind of mindfuck that might be the design of an adversarial agency. (Remind me to tell you about the long line, which is like the line of real numbers, except much longer.)</p>
<p>In any case, as soon as we start to ask questions <em>about humans</em>—and far more so <em>identifiable groups</em> of humans—we end up entering the domain of <em>politics</em>.</p>
<p>We really <em>shouldn't</em>. Everyone <em>should</em> perceive a common interest in true beliefs—maps that reflect the territory, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor">simple theories</a> that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">predict our observations</a>—because beliefs that make accurate predictions are <em>useful</em> for making good decisions. That's what "beliefs" are <em>for</em>, evolutionary speaking: my analogues in humanity's environment of evolutionary adaptedness were better off believing that (say) the berries from some bush were good to eat if and only if the berries were <em>actually</em> good to eat. If my analogues unduly-optimistically thought the berries were good when they actually weren't, they'd get sick (and lose fitness), but if they unduly-pessimistically thought the berries were not good when they actually were, they'd miss out on valuable calories (and fitness).</p>
<p>(Okay, this story is actually somewhat complicated by the fact that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gTNB9CQd5hnbkMxAG/protein-reinforcement-and-dna-consequentialism">evolution didn't "figure out" how to build brains</a> that <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/decision-theory/">keep track of probability and utility separately</a>: my analogues in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness might also have been better off assuming that a rustling in the bush was a tiger, even if it usually wasn't a tiger, because failing to detect actual tigers was so much more costly (in terms of fitness) than erroneously "detecting" an imaginary tiger. But let this pass.)</p>
<p><a id="self-deception"></a>The problem is that, while any individual should always want true beliefs for <em>themselves</em> in order to navigate the world, you might want <em>others</em> to have false beliefs in order to trick them into <em>mis</em>-navigating the world in a way that benefits you. If I'm trying to sell you a used car, then—counterintuitively—I might not <em>want</em> you to have accurate beliefs about the car, if that would reduce the sale price or result in no deal. If our analogues in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness regularly faced structurally similar situations, and if it's expensive to maintain two sets of beliefs (the real map for ourselves, and a fake map for our victims), we might end up with a tendency not just to be lying motherfuckers who deceive others, but also to <em>self</em>-deceive in situations where the payoffs (in fitness) of tricking others outweighed those of being clear-sighted ourselves.</p>
<p>That's why we're not smart enough to want a discipline of Actual Social Science. The benefits of having a collective understanding of human behavior—a <em>shared</em> map that reflects the territory that we are—could be enormous, but beliefs about our own qualities, and those of socially-salient groups to which we belong (<em>e.g.</em>, sex, race, and class) are <em>exactly</em> those for which we face the largest incentive to deceive and self-deceive. Counterintuitively, I might not <em>want</em> you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my friendship (or the disutility of my animosity), for the same reason that I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my used car. That makes it a lot harder not just to <em>get the right answer for the reasons</em>, but also to <em>trust</em> that your fellow so-called "scholars" are trying to get the right answer, rather than trying to sneak self-aggrandizing lies into the shared map in order to fuck you over. You can't <em>just</em> write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds about "things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other", because almost no one is that oblivious. To write and be understood, you have to do some sort of <em>positioning</em> of how your work fits in to <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">the war</a> over the shared map.</p>
<p><a id="blank-slate"></a>Murray positions <em>Human Diversity</em> as a corrective to a "blank slate" orthodoxy that refuses to entertain any possibility of biological influences on psychological group differences. The three parts of the book are pitched not simply as "stuff we know about biologically-mediated group differences" (the oblivious-science-nerd approach that I would prefer), but as a rebuttal to "Gender Is a Social Construct", "Race Is a Social Construct", and "Class Is a Function of Privilege." At the same time, however, Murray is careful to position his work as <em>nonthreatening</em>: "there are no monsters in the closet," he writes, "no dread doors that we must fear opening." He likewise "state[s] explicitly that [he] reject[s] claims that groups of people, be they sexes or races or classes, can be ranked from superior to inferior [or] that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity."</p>
<p>I think this strategy is sympathetic but <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/">ultimately ineffective</a>. Murray is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while denying the possibility of any <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications">unfortunate implications</a> of the orthodoxy being false. It's like ... <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution">theistic evolution</a>: satisfactory as long as you <em>don't think about it too hard</em>, but among those with a high <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition">need for cognition</a>, who know what it's like to truly believe (as I once believed), it's not going to convince anyone who hasn't <em>already</em> broken from the orthodoxy.</p>
<p>Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood." I <em>strongly</em> agree with the <em>moral sentiment</em>, the underlying <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200416104807/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/">axiology</a> that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.</p>
<p>And yet I have been ... <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/teaxCFgtmCQ3E9fy8/the-martial-art-of-rationality">trained</a>. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points">to even that which is most sacred</a>. Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—<a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/">to the <em>process</em> underlying my <em>current best guess</em></a> as to that which is most sacred. If that which was believed to be most sacred turns out to not be entirely coherent ... then we might have some philosophical work to do, to <a href="https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility"><em>reformulate</em> the sacred moral ideal in a way that's actually coherent</a>.</p>
<p>"Nothing we learn will threaten <em>X</em> <em>properly understood</em>." When you elide the specific assignment <em>X</em> := "human equality", the <em>form</em> of this statement is kind of suspicious, right? Why "properly understood"? It would be weird to say, "Nothing we learn will threaten the homotopy groups of an <em>n</em>-sphere <em>properly understood</em>."</p>
<p>This kind of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable">claim to be non-disprovable</a> seems like the kind of thing you would only invent if you <em>were</em> secretly worried about <em>X</em> being threatened by new discoveries, and wanted to protect your ability to backtrack and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">re-gerrymander your definition of <em>X</em> to protect what you</a> (<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief">think that you</a>) currently believe.</p>
<p>If being an oblivious science nerd isn't an option, half-measures won't suffice. I think we can do better by going meta and analyzing the <em>functions</em> being served by the constraints on our discourse and seeking out clever self-aware strategies for satisfying those functions <em>without</em> <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/">lying about everything</a>. We mustn't fear opening the dread meta-door in front of whether there actually <em>are</em> dread doors that we must fear opening.</p>
<p>Why <em>is</em> the blank slate doctrine so compelling, that so many feel the need to protect it at all costs? (As I once felt the need.) It's not ... if you've read this far, I assume you <em>will</em> forgive me—it's not <em>scientifically</em> compelling. If you were studying humans the way an alien superintelligence would, trying to <em>get the right answer for the right reasons</em> (which can conclude <em>conditional</em> answers: if what humans are like depends on <em>choices</em> about what we teach our children, then there will still be a fact of the matter as to what choices lead to what outcomes), you wouldn't put a whole lot of prior probability on the hypothesis "Both sexes and all ancestry-groupings of humans have the same distribution of psychological predispositions; any observed differences in behavior are solely attributable to differences in their environments." <em>Why</em> would that be true? We <em>know</em> that sexual dimorphism exists. We <em>know</em> that reproductively isolated populations evolve different traits to adapt to their environments, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin%27s_finches">those birds with differently-shaped beaks that Darwin saw on his boat trip</a>. We could certainly <em>imagine</em> that none of the relevant selection pressures on humans happened to touch the brain—but why? Wouldn't that be kind of a weird coincidence?</p>
<p>If the blank slate doctrine isn't <em>scientifically</em> compelling—it's not something you would invent while trying to build shared maps that reflect the territory—then its appeal must have something to do with some function it plays in <em>conflicts</em> over the shared map, where no one trusts each other to be doing Actual Social Science rather than lying to fuck everyone else over.</p>
<p><a id="schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts"></a>And that's where the blank slate doctrine absolutely <em>shines</em>—it's the <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point">Schelling point</a> for preventing group conflicts! (A <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yJfBzcDL9fBHJfZ6P/nash-equilibria-and-schelling-points"><em>Schelling point</em></a> is a choice that's salient as <a href="/2019/Dec/more-schelling/">a focus for mutual expectations</a>: what I think that you think that I think ... <em>&c.</em> we'll choose.) If you admit that there could be differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitudes, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria</a> as some "inevitable" natural order.</p>
<p>If you're afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to <em>make the question un-askable</em>. Can't oppress people on the basis of race if race <em>doesn't exist!</em> Denying the existence of sex is harder—which doesn't stop people from occasionally trying. "I realize I am writing in an LGBT era when some argue that 63 distinct genders have been identified," Murray notes at the beginning of Appendix 2. But this oblique acerbity fails to pass the <a href="https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html">Ideological Turing Test</a>. The language of <em>has been identified</em> suggests an attempt at scientific taxonomy—a project, which I share with Murray, of fitting categories to describe a preexisting objective reality. But I don't think the people making 63-item typeahead select "Gender" fields for websites are thinking in such terms to begin with. The specific number 63 <a href="/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/">is ridiculous and can't exist</a>; it might as well be, and often is, a fill-in-the-blank free text field. Despite being insanely evil (where I mean the adjective literally rather than as a generic intensifier—evil in a way that is of or related to insanity), I must acknowledge this is at least good game theory. If you don't trust taxonomists to be acting in good faith—if you think we're trying to bulldoze the territory to fit a preconceived map—then <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction">destroying the language</a> that would be used to be build oppressive maps is a smart move.</p>
<p>The taboo mostly only applies to <em>psychological</em> trait differences, both because those are a <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/">sensitive subject</a>, and because they're easier to motivatedly <em>see what you want to see</em>: whereas things like height or skin tone can be directly seen and uncontroversially measured with well-understood physical instruments (like a meterstick or digital photo pixel values), psychological assessments are <em>much</em> more complicated and therefore hard to detach from the eye of the beholder. (If I describe Mary as "warm, compassionate, and agreeable", the words mean <em>something</em> in the sense that they change what experiences you anticipate—if you believed my report, you would be <em>surprised</em> if Mary were to kick your dog and make fun of your nose job—but the things that they mean are a high-level statistical signal in behavior for which we <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests">don't have a simple measurement device</a> like a meterstick to appeal to if you and I don't trust each other's character assessments of Mary.)</p>
<p>Notice how the "not allowing sex and race differences in psychological traits to appear on shared maps is the Schelling point for resistance to sex- and race-based oppression" actually gives us an <em>explanation</em> for <em>why</em> one might reasonably have a sense that there are dread doors that we must not open. Undermining the "everyone is Actually Equal" Schelling point could <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8q8p6n/culture_war_roundup_for_june_11/e0mxwe9/">catalyze a preference cascade</a>—a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes">slide down the slippery slope to the the next Schelling point</a>, which might be a lot worse than the <em>status quo</em> on the "amount of rape and genocide" metric, even if it does slightly better on "estimating heritability coefficients." The orthodoxy isn't just being dumb for no reason. In analogy, Galileo and Darwin weren't <em>trying</em> to undermine Christianity—they had much more interesting things to think about—but religious authorities were <em>right</em> to fear heliocentrism and evolution: if the prevailing coordination equilibrium depends on lies, then telling the truth <em>is</em> a threat and it <em>is</em> disloyal. And if the prevailing coordination equilibrium is basically <em>good</em>, then you can see why purported truth-tellers striking at the heart of the faith might be believed to be evil.</p>
<p>Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgments of the injustice of historical patriarchy ("When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start [...] women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total legal subservience to men") and racial oppression ("slavery experienced by Africans in the New World went far beyond legal constraints [...] The freedom granted by emancipation in America was only marginally better in practice and the situation improved only slowly through the first half of the twentieth century"). It feels ... defensive? (To his credit, Murray is generally pretty forthcoming about how the need to write "defensively" shaped the book, as in a sidebar in the introduction that says that he'd prefer to say a lot more about evopsych, but he chose to just focus on empirical findings in order to avoid the charge of telling <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story">just-so stories</a>.)</p>
<p>But this kind of defensive half-measure satisfies no one. From the oblivious-science-nerd perspective—the view that agrees with Murray that "everyone should calm down"—you shouldn't <em>need</em> to genuflect to the memory of some historical injustice before you're allowed to talk about Science. But from the perspective that cares about Justice and not just Truth, an <em>insincere</em> gesture or a strategic concession is all the more dangerous insofar as it could function as camouflage for a nefarious hidden agenda. If your work is explicitly aimed at <em>destroying the anti-oppression Schelling-point belief</em>, a few hand-wringing historical interludes and bromides about human equality having no testable implications (!!) aren't going to clear you of the suspicion that you're <em>doing it on purpose</em>—trying to destroy the anti-oppression Schelling point in order to oppress, and not because anything that can be destroyed by the truth, should be.</p>
<p>And sufficient suspicion makes communication nearly impossible. (If you <em>know</em> someone is lying, their words mean nothing, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence">not even as the opposite of the truth</a>.) As far as many of Murray's detractors are concerned, it almost doesn't matter what the text of <em>Human Diversity</em> says, how meticulously researched of a psychology/neuroscience/genetics lit review it is. From their perspective, Murray is "hiding the ball": they're not mad about <em>this</em> book; they're mad about specifically chapters 13 and 14 of a book Murray coauthored twenty-five years ago. (I don't think I'm claiming to be a mind-reader here; the first 20% of <a href="https://archive.is/b4xKB"><em>The New York Times</em>'s review of <em>Human Diversity</em></a> is pretty explicit and representative.)</p>
<p>In 1994's <em>The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life</em>, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein argued that a lot of variation in life outcomes is explained by variation in intelligence. Some people think that folk concepts of "intelligence" or being "smart" are ill-defined and therefore not a proper object of scientific study. But that hasn't stopped some psychologists from trying to construct tests purporting to measure an "intelligence quotient" (or <em>IQ</em> for short). It turns out that if you give people a bunch of different mental tests, the results all positively correlate with each other: people who are good at one mental task, like listening to a list of numbers and repeating them backwards ("reverse digit span"), are also good at others, like knowing what words mean ("vocabulary"). There's a lot of fancy linear algebra involved, but basically, you can visualize people's test results as a hyper<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsoid">ellipsoid</a> in some high-dimensional space where the dimensions are the different tests. (I rely on this <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">"configuration space"</a> visual metaphor <em>so much</em> for <em>so many</em> things that when I started <a href="/">my secret ("secret") gender blog</a>, it felt right to put it under a <code>.space</code> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain">TLD</a>.) <a id="the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid"></a>The longest axis of the hyperellipsoid corresponds to the "<em>g</em> factor" of "general" intelligence—the choice of axis that cuts through the most variance in mental abilities.</p>
<p>It's important not to overinterpret the <em>g</em> factor as some unitary essence of intelligence rather than the length of a hyperellipsoid. It seems likely that <a href="https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/03/07/what-the-general-factor-of-intelligence-is-and-isnt-or-why-intuitive-unitarianism-is-a-lousy-guide-to-the-neurobiology-of-higher-cognitive-ability/">if you gave people a bunch of <em>physical</em> tests, they would positively correlate with each other</a>, such that you could extract a <a href="https://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/09/g-factor-of-sports.html">"general factor of athleticism"</a>. (It would be really interesting if anyone's actually done this using the same methodology used to construct IQ tests!) But <em>athleticism</em> is going to be an <em>very</em> "coarse" construct for which <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dC7mP5nSwvpL65Qu5/why-the-tails-come-apart">the tails come apart</a>: for example, world champion 100-meter sprinter Usain Bolt's best time in the <em>800</em> meters is <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/how-fast-would-usain-bolt-run-the-mile">reportedly only around 2:10</a> <a href="https://archive.is/T988h">or 2:07</a>! (For comparison, <em>I</em> ran a 2:08.3 in high school once!)</p>
<p>Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, <em>&c.</em>, and how Society is becoming increasingly stratified by cognitive abilities, as school credentials become the ticket to the new upper class.</p>
<p><a id="the-reason-everyone-and-her-dog-is-still-mad"></a>This <em>should</em> just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone <em>and her dog</em> is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, <em>apparently</em>, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200620184942/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/">Ashkenazi Jews do the best</a>, which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm <a href="/images/ancestry_report.png">only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)</a> explains my low IQ. (<a href="/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg">I got a 131</a> on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children">WISC-III</a> at age 10, but that's pretty dumb <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/">compared to</a> some of my <a href="/tag/my-robot-cult/">robot-cult</a> friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's <em>d</em> ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by <em>d</em> = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)</p>
<p>Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to "play up" group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn't be <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling">relevant</a>. As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in <em>The Anatomy of Racial Inequality</em>, cognitive abilities decline with <em>age</em>, and yet we don't see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed by the white majority as an "us"—our mothers and fathers—rather than an outgroup. <em>Individual</em> differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because "smart people" as a group aren't construed as a natural political coalition—although Murray's work on cognitive class stratification would seem to suggest this intuition is mistaken.</p>
<p>It's important not to overinterpret the IQ-scores-by-race results; there are a bunch of standard caveats that go here that everyone's treatment of the topic needs to include. Again, just because variance in a trait is statistically associated with variance in genes <em>within</em> a population, does <em>not</em> mean that differences in that trait <em>between</em> populations are <em>caused</em> by genes: <a href="#heritability-caveats">remember the illustrations about</a> sun-deprived plants and internet-deprived red-haired children. Group differences in observed tested IQs are entirely compatible with a world in which those differences are entirely due to the environment imposed by an overtly or structurally racist society. Maybe the tests are culturally biased. Maybe people with higher socioeconomic status get more opportunities to develop their intellect, and racism impedes socio-economic mobility. And so on.</p>
<p>The problem is, a lot of the blank-slatey environmentally-caused-differences-only hypotheses for group IQ differences start to look less compelling when you look into the details. "Maybe the tests are biased", for example, isn't an insurmountable defeater to the entire endeavor of IQ testing—it is <em>itself</em> a falsifiable hypothesis, or can become one if you specify what you mean by "bias" in detail. One idea of what it would mean for a test to be <em>biased</em> is if it's partially measuring something other than what it purports to be measuring: if your test measures a <em>combination</em> of "intelligence" and "submission to the hegemonic cultural dictates of the test-maker", then individuals and groups that submit less to your cultural hegemony are going to score worse, and if you <em>market</em> your test as unbiasedly measuring intelligence, then people who believe your marketing copy will be misled into thinking that those who don't submit are dumber than they really are. But if so, and if not all of your individual test questions are <em>equally</em> loaded on intelligence and cultural-hegemony, then the cultural bias should <em>show up in the statistics</em>. If some questions are more "fair" and others are relatively more culture-biased, then you would expect the <em>order of item difficulties</em> to differ by culture: the <a href="/papers/baker-kim-the_item_characteristic_curve.pdf">"item characteristic curve"</a> plotting the probability of getting a biased question "right" as a function of <em>overall</em> test score should differ by culture, with the hegemonic group finding it "easier" and others finding it "harder". Conversely, if the questions that discriminate most between differently-scoring cultural/ethnic/"racial" groups were the same as the questions that discriminate between (say) younger and older children <em>within</em> each group, that would be the kind of statistical clue you would expect to see if the test was unbiased and the group difference was real.</p>
<p>Hypotheses that accept IQ test results as unbiased, but attribute group differences in IQ to the environment, also make statistical predictions that could be falsified. Controlling for parental socioeconomic status only cuts the black–white gap by a third. (And note, on the hereditarian model, some of the correlation between parental SES and child outcomes is due to both being causally downstream of genes.) The mathematical relationship between between-group and within-group heritability means that the conjunction of wholly-environmentally-caused group differences, and the within-group heritability, makes quantitative predictions about how much the environments of the groups differ. Skin color is actually only controlled by a small number of alleles, so if you think Society's discrimination on skin color causes IQ differences, you could maybe design a clever study that measures both overall-ancestry and skin color, and does statistics on what happens when they diverge. And so on.</p>
<p>In mentioning these arguments in passing, I'm <em>not</em> trying to provide a comprehensive lit review on the causality of group IQ differences. (That's <a href="https://humanvarieties.org/2019/12/22/the-persistence-of-cognitive-inequality-reflections-on-arthur-jensens-not-unreasonable-hypothesis-after-fifty-years/">someone else's blog</a>.) I'm not (that?) interested in this particular topic, and <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#mu">without having mastered the technical literature, my assessment would be of little value</a>. Rather, I am ... doing some context-setting for the problem I <em>am</em> interested in, of fixing public discourse. The reason we can't have an intellectually-honest public discussion about human biodiversity is because good people want to respect the anti-oppression Schelling point and are afraid of giving ammunition to racists and sexists in the war over the shared map. "Black people are, on average, genetically less intelligent than white people" is the kind of sentence that pretty much only racists would feel <em>good</em> about saying out loud, independently of its actual truth value. In a world where most speech is about manipulating shared maps for political advantage rather than <em>getting the right answer for the right reasons</em>, it is <em>rational</em> to infer that anyone who entertains such hypotheses is either motivated by racial malice, or is at least complicit with it—and that rational expectation isn't easily canceled with a <em>pro forma</em> "But, but, civil discourse" or "But, but, the true meaning of Equality is unfalsifiable" <a href="http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html">disclaimer</a>.</p>
<p>To speak to those who aren't <em>already</em> oblivious science nerds—or are committed to emulating such, as it is scientifically dubious whether anyone is really that oblivious—you need to put <em>more effort</em> into your excuse for why you're interested in these topics. Here's mine, and it's from the heart, though it's up to the reader to judge for herself how credible I am when I say this—</p>
<p>I don't want to be complicit with hatred or oppression. I want to stay loyal to the underlying egalitarian–individualist axiology that makes the blank slate doctrine <em>sound like a good idea</em>. But I also want to understand reality, to make sense of things. I want <em>a world that's not lying to me</em>. Having to believe false things—or even just not being able <em>say</em> certain true things when they would otherwise be relevant—extracts a <em>dire</em> cost on our ability to make sense of the world, because you can't just censor a few forbidden hypotheses—<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies">you have to censor everything that <em>implies</em> them</a>, and everything that implies <em>them</em>: the more adept you are at making logical connections, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology">the more of your mind you need to excise to stay in compliance</a>.</p>
<p>We can't talk about group differences, for fear that anyone arguing that differences exist is just trying to shore up oppression. But ... structural oppression and actual group differences can <em>both exist at the same time</em>. They're not contradicting each other! Like, the fact that men are physically stronger than women (on average, but the effect size is enormous, like <em>d</em> ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is <em>not unrelated</em> to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to <em>credibly threaten</em> to physically overpower someone, <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/#threatpoints-and-bargaining">gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage</a>, even if the threat is typically unrealized.) That doesn't mean patriarchy is good; to think so would be to commit the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#NatFal">naturalistic fallacy</a> of <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#io">attempting to derive an <em>ought</em> from an <em>is</em></a>. No one would say that famine and plague are good just because they, too, are subject to scientific explanation. This is pretty obvious, really? But similarly, genetically-mediated differences in cognitive repertoires between ancestral populations are probably going to be <em>part</em> of the explanation for <em>why</em> we see the particular forms of inequality and oppression that we do, just as a brute fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and went smoother for the invaders than the colonization of Africa, had to do with the disease burden going the other way (Native Americans were particularly vulnerable to smallpox, but Europeans were particularly vulnerable to malaria).</p>
<p>Again—obviously—<em>is</em> does not imply <em>ought</em>. In deference to the historically well-justified egalitarian fear that such hypotheses will primarily be abused by bad actors to portray their own group as "superior", I suspect it's helpful to dwell on science-fictional scenarios in which the boot of history is one's own neck, if the boot does not happen to be on one's own neck in real life. If a race of lavender humans from an alternate dimension were to come through a wormhole and invade our Earth and cruelly subjugate <em>your</em> people, you would probably be pretty angry, and maybe join a paramilitary group aimed at overthrowing lavender supremacy and re-instantiating civil rights. The possibility of a partially-biological <em>explanation</em> for <em>why</em> the purple bastards discovered wormhole generators when we didn't (maybe they have <em>d</em> ≈ 1.8 on us in visuospatial skills, enabling their population to be first to "roll" a lucky genius (probably male) who could discover the wormhole field equations), would not make the conquest somehow justified.</p>
<p>I don't know how to build a better world, but it seems like there are quite <em>general</em> grounds on which we should expect that it would be helpful to be able to <em>talk</em> about social problems in the language of cause and effect, with the austere objectivity of an engineering discipline. If you want to build a bridge (that will actually stay up), you need to study the <a href="http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_strain.htm">"the careful textbooks [that] measure [...] the load, the shock, the pressure [that] material can bear."</a> If you want to build a just Society (that will actually stay up), you need a discipline of Actual Social Science that can publish textbooks, and to get <em>that</em>, you need the ability to <em>talk</em> about basic facts about human existence and make simple logical and statistical inferences between them.</p>
<p>And no one can do it! <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43585/the-buried-life">("Well for us, if even we, even for a moment, can get free our heart, and have our lips unchained—for that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!")</a> Individual scientists can get results in their respective narrow disciplines; Charles Murray can just <em>barely</em> summarize the science to a semi-popular audience without coming off as <em>too</em> overtly evil to modern egalitarian moral sensibilities. (At least, the smarter egalitarians? Or, maybe I'm just old.) But at least a couple aspects of reality are even <em>worse</em> (with respect to naïve, non-renormalized egalitarian moral sensibilities) than the ball-hiders like Murray can admit, having already blown their entire <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">Overton budget</a> explaining the relevant empirical findings.</p>
<p><a id="individuals-should-not-be-judged-by-the-average"></a>Murray approvingly quotes Steven Pinker (a fellow ball-hider, though <a href="https://archive.is/bNo2q">Pinker is better at it</a>): "Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."</p>
<p>A fine sentiment. I <em>emphatically</em> agree with the <em>underlying moral intuition</em> that makes "Individuals should not be judged by group membership" <em>sound like</em> a correct moral principle—one cries out at the <em>monstrous injustice</em> of the individual being oppressed on the basis of mere stereotypes of what other people who <em>look</em> like them might statistically be like.</p>
<p>But can I take this <em>literally</em> as the <em>exact</em> statement of a moral principle? <em>Technically?</em>—no! That's actually not how epistemology works! The proposed principle derives its moral force from the case of complete information: if you <em>know for a fact</em> that I have moral property P, then it would be monstrously unjust to treat me differently just because other people who look like me mostly don't have moral property P. But in the real world, we often—usually—don't <em>have</em> complete information about people, <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">or even about ourselves</a>.</p>
<p>Bayes's theorem (just <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Derivation">a few inferential steps away from the definition of conditional probability itself</a>, barely worthy of being called a "theorem") states that for hypothesis H and evidence E, P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E). This is <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/An-Intuitive-Explanation-Of-Bayess-Theorem">the fundamental equation</a> <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/A-Technical-Explanation-Of-Technical-Explanation">that governs</a> <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QrhAeKBkm2WsdRYao/searching-for-bayes-structure">all thought</a>. When you think you see a tree, that's really just your brain computing a high value for the probability of your sensory experiences given the hypothesis that there is a tree, multiplied by the prior probability that there is a tree, as a fraction of all the possible worlds that could be generating your sensory experiences.</p>
<p>What goes for seeing trees, goes the same for "treating individuals as individuals": the <em>process</em> of getting to know someone as an individual, involves your brain exploiting the statistical relationships between what you observe, and what you're trying to learn about. If you see someone wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, you're going to assume that they <em>probably</em> use Emacs, and asking them about their <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Init-File.html">dot-emacs file</a> is going to seem like a better casual conversation-starter compared to the base rate of people wearing non-Emacs shirts. Not <em>with certainty</em>—maybe they just found the shirt in a thrift store and thought it looked cool—but the shirt <em>shifts the probabilities</em> implied by your decisionmaking.</p>
<p>The problem that Bayesian reasoning poses for naïve egalitarian moral intuitions, is that, as far as I can tell, there's no <em>philosophically principled</em> reason for "probabilistic update about someone's psychology on the evidence that they're wearing an Emacs shirt" to be treated <em>fundamentally</em> differently from "probabilistic update about someone's psychology on the evidence that she's female". These are of course different questions, but to a Bayesian reasoner (an inhuman mathematical abstraction for <em>getting the right answer</em> and nothing else), they're the same <em>kind</em> of question: the correct update to make is an <em>empirical</em> matter that depends on the actual distribution of psychological traits among Emacs-shirt-wearers and among women. (In the possible world where <em>most</em> people wear tee-shirts from the thrift store that looked cool without knowing what they mean, the "Emacs shirt → Emacs user" inference would usually be wrong.) But to a naïve egalitarian, judging someone on their expressed affinity for Emacs is good, but judging someone on their sex is <em>bad and wrong</em>.</p>
<p>I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I'll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of <em>making generalizations</em> about <em>people</em> just—doesn't make sense. It's not even that it <em>shouldn't</em> be practiced (it's not that my heart wasn't in the right place), but that it <em>can't</em> be practiced—that the people who think they're practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work.</p>
<p><a id="everyday-base-rates"></a>Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as <a href="/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf">Nelson <em>et al.</em> 1990 did</a>, and people's guesses reflect both the photo-subjects' actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don't know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren't <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/#LogiOmni">"trigonometrically omniscient"</a>, <em>&c.</em>), this behavior is just <em>correct</em>: men really are taller than women on average, so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(true-height|apparent-height) <a href="https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/">because of</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean">regression to the mean</a> (and women and men regress to different means). But <a href="/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/">this all happens subconsciously</a>: in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) <em>and telling</em> the participants about the height-matching <em>and</em> offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can't consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context.</p>
<p>Once you understand at a <em>technical</em> level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, <em>and</em> implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information <em>anyway</em>, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps <em>get the right answer</em>. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I <em>can't prove it to you</em>, so you instead guess <em>incorrectly</em> that I don't just because other people who look like me mostly don't, and you don't have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn't exist under some other social equilibrium.</p>
<p>Nelson <em>et al.</em> also found that when the people in the photographs were pictured sitting down, then judgments of height depended much more on sex than when the photo-subjects were standing. This too makes Bayesian sense: if it's harder to tell how tall an individual is when they're sitting down, you rely more on your demographic prior. In order to reduce injustice to people who are an outlier for their group, one could argue that <a href="/2017/Nov/interlude-x/">there is a moral imperative</a> to seek out interventions to get more fine-grained information about individuals, so that we don't need to rely on the coarse, vague information embodied in demographic stereotypes. The <em>moral spirit</em> of egalitarian–individualism mostly survives in our efforts to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2jp98zdLo898qExrr/hug-the-query">hug the query</a> and get specific information with which to discriminate amongst individuals. (And <em>discriminate</em>—<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/discriminate">to distinguish, to make distinctions</a>—is the correct word.) If you care about someone's height, it is <em>better</em> to precisely measure it using a meterstick than to just look at them standing up, and it is better to look at them standing up than to look at them sitting down. If you care about someone's skills as potential employee, it is <em>better</em> to give them a work-sample test that assesses the specific skills that you're interested in, than it is to rely on a general IQ test, and it's <em>far</em> better to use an IQ test than to use mere stereotypes. If our means of measuring individuals aren't reliable or cheap enough, such that we still end up using prior information from immutable demographic categories, that's a problem of grave moral seriousness—but in light of the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws"><em>mathematical laws</em></a> governing reasoning under uncertainty, it's a problem that realistically needs to be solved with <em>better tests</em> and <em>better signals</em>, not by <em>pretending not to have a prior</em>.</p>
<p>This could take the form of <em>finer-grained</em> stereotypes. If someone says of me, "Taylor Saotome-Westlake? Oh, he's a <em>man</em>, you know what <em>they're</em> like," I would be offended—I mean, I would if I still believed that getting offended ever helps with anything. (It <em>never helps</em>.) I'm <em>not</em> like typical men, and I don't want to be confused with them. But if someone says, "Taylor Saotome-Westlake? Oh, he's one of those IQ 130, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits">mid-to-low Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, high Openness</a>, left-libertarian American Jewish atheist autogynephilic male computer programmers; you know what <em>they're</em> like," my response is to nod and say, "Yeah, pretty much." I'm not <em>exactly</em> like the others, but I don't mind being confused with them.</p>
<p>The other place where I think Murray is hiding the ball (even from himself) is in the section on "reconstructing a moral vocabulary for discussing human differences." (I agree that this is a very important project!) Murray writes—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think at the root [of the reluctance to discuss immutable human differences] is the new upper class's conflation of intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth. Few admit it, of course. But the evolving zeitgeist of the new upper class has led to a misbegotten hierarchy whereby being a surgeon is <em>better</em> in some sense of human worth than being an insurance salesman, being an executive in a high-tech firm is <em>better</em> than being a housewife, and a neighborhood of people with advanced degrees is <em>better</em> than a neighborhood of high-school graduates. To put it so baldly makes it obvious how senseless it is. There shouldn't be any relationship between these things and human worth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I take strong issue with Murray's specific examples here—as an <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/">incredibly bitter</a> autodidact, I care not at all for formal school degrees, and as my fellow nobody pseudonymous blogger <a href="https://write.as/harold-lee/seizing-the-means-of-home-production">Harold Lee points out</a>, many of those stuck in the technology rat race aspire to escape to a more domestic- and community-focused life not unlike that of a housewife. But after quibbling with the specific illustrations, I think I'm just going to bite the bullet here?</p>
<p><em>Yes</em>, intellectual ability <em>is</em> a component of human worth! Maybe that's putting it baldly, but I think the <em>alternative</em> is obviously senseless. The fact that I have the ability and motivation to (for example, among many other things I do) write this cool science–philosophy blog about my delusional paraphilia where I do things like summarize and critique the new Charles Murray book, is a big part of <em>what makes my life valuable</em>—both to me, and to the people who interact with me. If I were to catch COVID-19 next month and lose 40 IQ points due to oxygen-deprivation-induced brain damage and not be able to write blog posts like this one anymore, that would be <em>extremely terrible</em> for me—it would make my life less-worth-living. (And this kind of judgment is reflected in health and economic policymaking in the form of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year">quality-adjusted life years</a>.) And my friends who love me, love me not as an irreplaceably-unique-but-otherwise-featureless atom of person-ness, but <em>because</em> my specific array of cognitive repertoires makes me a specific person who provides a specific kind of company. There can't be such a thing as <em>literally</em> unconditional love, because to love <em>someone in particular</em>, implicitly imposes a condition: you're only committed to love those configurations of matter that constitute an implementation of your beloved, rather than someone or something else.</p>
<p>Murray continues—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The conflation of intellectual ability with human worth helps to explain the new upper class's insistence that inequalities of intellectual ability must be the product of environmental disadvantage. Many people with high IQs really do feel sorry for people with low IQs. If the environment is to blame, then those unfortunates can be helped, and that makes people who want to help them feel good. If genes are to blame, it makes people who want to help them feel bad. People prefer feeling good to feeling bad, so they engage in confirmation bias when it comes to the evidence about the causes of human differences.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I agree with Murray that this kind of psychology explains a lot of the resistance to hereditarian explanations. But as long as we're accusing people of motivated reasoning, I think Murray's solution is engaging in a similar kind of denial, but just putting it in a different place. The idea that people are unequal in ways that matter is <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/faHbrHuPziFH7Ef7p/why-are-individual-iq-differences-ok">legitimately too horrifying to contemplate</a>, so liberals <a href="/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/">deny the inequality</a>, and conservatives deny <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter">that it matters</a>. But I think if you <em>really</em> understand the fact–value distinction and see that the naturalistic fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy (and not even a tempting one), that the progress of humankind has consisted of using our wits to impose our will on an <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god">indifferent universe</a>, then the very concept of "too horrifying to contemplate" becomes a grave error. The map is not the territory: <em>contemplating</em> doesn't make things worse; not-contemplating that which is <em>already there</em> can't make things better—and can blind you to opportunities to make things better.</p>
<p>Recently, Richard Dawkins <a href="https://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/twitter-piles-on-richard-dawkins-over-eugenics-tweet/13333">spurred a lot of criticism on social media for pointing out that</a> selective breeding would work on humans (that is, succeed at increasing the value of the traits selected for in subsequent generations), for the same reasons it works on domesticated nonhuman animals—while stressing, of course, that he deplores the idea: it's just that our moral commitments can't constrain the facts. Intellectuals with the reading-comprehension skill, <a href="https://archive.is/uaFFF">including Murray</a>, leapt to defend Dawkins and <a href="https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/16/dawkins-makes-a-tweet/">concur on both points</a>—that eugenics would work, and that it would obviously be terribly immoral. And yet no one seems to bother explaining or arguing <em>why</em> it would be immoral. Yes, obviously <em>murdering and sterilizing</em> people is bad. But if the human race is to continue and people are going to have children <em>anyway</em>, those children are going to be born with <em>some</em> distribution of genotypes. There are probably going to be human decisions that do <em>not</em> involve <em>murdering and sterilizing people</em> that would affect that distribution—<a href="http://intelligence.org/files/EmbryoSelection.pdf">perhaps involving</a> <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection">selection of <em>in vitro</em> fertilized embryos</a>. If the distribution of genotypes were to change in a way that made the next generation grow up happier, and healthier, and smarter, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aud7CL7uhz55KL8jG/transhumanism-as-simplified-humanism">that would be good</a> for those children, and it wouldn't hurt anyone else! Life is not a zero-sum game! This is pretty obvious, really? But if no one except nobody pseudonymous bloggers can even say it, how are we to start the work?</p>
<p>The author of the <em>Xenosystems</em> blog mischievously posits <a href="http://www.xenosystems.net/five-stages-of-hbd/">five stages of knowledge of human biodiversity</a> (in analogy to the famous, albeit <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model">reportedly lacking in empirical support</a>, five-stage Kübler-Ross model of grief), culminating in Stage 4: Depression ("Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?") and Stage 5: Acceptance ("Blank slate liberalism really has been a mountain of dishonest garbage, hasn't it? Guess it's time for it to die ...").</p>
<p>I think I got stuck halfway between Stage 4 and 5? It can <em>simultaneously</em> be the case that reality is evil, <em>and</em> that blank slate liberalism <em>contains</em> a mountain of dishonest garbage. That doesn't mean the whole thing is garbage. You <em>can't</em> brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something <em>good</em> in them. I would still be with the program, except that the current coordination equilibrium is <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">really not working out for me</a>. So it is with respect for the good works enabled by the anti-oppression Schelling point belief, that I set my sights on reorganizing at the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tCwresAuSvk867rzH/speaking-truth-to-power-is-a-schelling-point">other Schelling point of <em>just tell the goddamned truth</em></a>—not in spite of the consequences, but because of the consequences of what good people can do when we're fully informed. Each of us in her own way.</p>Peering Through Reverent Fingers2020-04-27T23:30:00-07:002020-04-27T23:30:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-04-27:/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/<blockquote>
<p>Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a <em>process</em> of self-identification. Moreover, it is …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Any evolutionary advantage must come from a feature affecting our behavior. Thus, there is no evolutionary advantage to simply having a belief about our identity. Self-identity can matter and could have mattered only if it affects behavior, in which case it is really a <em>process</em> of self-identification. Moreover, it is not a matter of affirming a self-identity that we possess. For a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all.</p>
<p>—Joseph M. Whitmeyer, "How Evolutionary Psychology Can Contribute to Group Process Research", in <em>The Oxford Handbook of Evolution, Biology, and Society</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>As an atheist, I'm not really a fan of religions, but I'll give them one thing: at least their packages of delusions are <em>stable</em>. The experience of losing your religion is a painful one, but once you've overcome the trauma of finding out that everything you believed was a lie, the process of figuring out how to live among the still-faithful now that you are no longer one of them, is something you only have to do <em>once</em>; it's not like everyone will have adopted a new Jesus Two while you were off having your crisis of faith. And the first Jesus was invisible anyway; you won't be able to pray sincerely, and that does set you apart from your—the—community, but your day-to-day life will be mostly unaffected.</p>
<p>The progressive <em>Zeitgeist</em> does not even offer this respite. Getting over psychological-sex-differences denialism was painful, but after many years of study and meditation, I think I've finally come to accept the horrible truth: women and men really are psychologically different. This sets me apart from the community, but not very much. The original lie wasn't <em>invisible</em> exactly, but it never caused too many problems, because it's easy to doublethink around. Most of the functional use of sex categories in Society is handled by seamless subconscious reference-classing, without anyone needing to consciously, verbally reason about sex differences: no one <em>actually</em> makes the same predictions or decisions about women and men—that would be crazy—but since you don't have direct introspective access to what computations your brain used to cough up a prediction or decision, you can just <em>assume</em> that you're treating everyone equally, and only rarely does the course of ordinary events force you to acknowledge or even notice the lie.</p>
<p>But in the decade I had my back turned reading science books, my former quasi-religion somehow came up with <em>new</em> lies: now, it's not enough to believe that women and men are mentally the same, you're <em>also</em> supposed to accept that those categories refer to some atomic mental property that can only be known by verbal self-report. But this actually breaks the mechanism that made the first lie so harmless: the shear stress of your prediction-and-decision classifier <em>disagreeing</em> with the punishment signals that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web">the intelligent social web</a> is using to train your pronoun-selection classifier throws the previously-backgrounded existence of the former into sharp relief. You really are expected to believe in Jesus Two! And it's <em>far</em> more ridiculous than the first one! I'm never going to get over this!</p>The Reverse Murray Rule2020-04-06T05:00:00-07:002020-04-06T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-04-06:/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/<p>In the notes to his <em>Real Education</em>, Charles Murray proposes a convention for third-person singular pronouns where the sex of the referent is unknown or irrelevant—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As always, I adhere to the Murray Rule for dealing with third-person singular pronouns, which prescribes using the gender of the author or principal …</p></blockquote><p>In the notes to his <em>Real Education</em>, Charles Murray proposes a convention for third-person singular pronouns where the sex of the referent is unknown or irrelevant—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As always, I adhere to the Murray Rule for dealing with third-person singular pronouns, which prescribes using the gender of the author or principal author as the default, and I hope in vain that others will adopt it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Murray Rule is a fine illustration of the <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">use of conventions to break the symmetry</a> between arbitrary choices: instead of having to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15">flip a coin every time</a> you want to talk about a hypothetical human in the third person, you pick a convention <em>once</em>, and let the convention pick the pronouns—and <em>furthermore</em>, Murray is proposing, you can use the sex of the author as an "input" to achieve determinism without the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Generic_he">traditional sexism of the universal generic masculine</a> or its <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DistaffCounterpart">distaff counterpart</a> favored by some modern academics.</p>
<p>But even this still leaves us with one information-theoretic bit of freedom—one binary choice not yet determined, between the Murray Rule (female authors use the generic feminine; male authors use generic masculine) and the Reverse Murray Rule (female authors use generic masculine; male authors use generic feminine).</p>
<p>I'll concede that the Murray Rule is a more natural <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point">Schelling point</a> on account of grouping "like with like": the generic hypothetical person's gender matching the author's seems to require less of a particular rationale than the other way around. But I much prefer the Reverse Murray Rule on <em>æsthetic</em> grounds. The implicit assumption that authors regard their <em>own</em> sex the normal, default case feels ... chauvinistic. And kind of <em>gay</em>. Women and men were <em>made for each other</em>. It is <em>wrong</em> to regard the opposite sex as some irrelevant alien, rather than an alternate self. That's why I tend to reach for the generic feminine when I'm being formal enough to eschew singular <em>they</em>, and <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/06/lexicographic/">the real reason</a> I write "women and men" in that order. I like to imagine my hypothetical female analogue doing the opposite—or rather, doing the same thing—using male-first orderings and the generic masculine on the same verbalized rationale and analogous motivations in her own history ... even though she doesn't, <em>can't</em> exist.</p>Don't Read the Comments??2020-04-05T22:30:00-07:002020-04-05T22:30:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-04-05:/2020/Apr/dont-read-the-comments/<p>Historically, <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> has not provided a comment section. There were two reasons for this.</p>
<p>First, technical limitations, downstream of technical æsthetics. There are standard out-of-the-box blogging hosts—your <a href="https://wordpress.com/">WordPress</a>, your <a href="https://medium.com/">Medium</a>, <em>&c.</em>—that are easy for anyone to use, at the cost of taking control …</p><p>Historically, <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> has not provided a comment section. There were two reasons for this.</p>
<p>First, technical limitations, downstream of technical æsthetics. There are standard out-of-the-box blogging hosts—your <a href="https://wordpress.com/">WordPress</a>, your <a href="https://medium.com/">Medium</a>, <em>&c.</em>—that are easy for anyone to use, at the cost of taking control away from the user, locking access to <em>your soul</em> away on someone else's server, or, at best, obfuscated in some database behind opaque gobs of <a href="https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/">PHP</a>. My real-name blog (started in December 2011, when I was much less technically adept) is still running WordPress, and I'm sad about it. In contrast, this blog is produced using the <a href="https://blog.getpelican.com/">Pelican</a> static site generator from Markdown text files, <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git">versioned in Git</a>—simple tools I <em>understand</em>, producing flat HTML files that Nginx can serve. When I don't like something about my theme or my plugins, I'm not at the mercy of the developers; I can just fix it myself. The lack of a database meant forgoing a comment section, but that seemed like a small loss, because—</p>
<p>Second, internet comment sections are <em>garbage</em> and I don't want to be bothered to moderate one. I thought, people who are actually interested in replying to my writing can write a longform response on their own blog (please?—I'll link back), or on Reddit when I share to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/">/r/TheMotte</a>; and people who want to talk to me can find <a href="mailto:ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com">my email address</a> (checked less often than my real-name email; I regret any delays) on <a href="/about/">the About page</a>.</p>
<p>So I thought, and yet—first, the same do-it-myself æsthetics that make static-site generators attractive, make me cautiously open to the idea of a comment section that I can configure and host myself, rather than being held commercially hostage by the likes of <a href="https://disqus.com/">Disqus</a>. Second, perhaps some small consolation for never being a popular writer (I'm not prolific enough, and occupying too <em>weird</em> of a niche), is that maybe <em>my</em> readership is exclusive and discerning enough for the comments section to <em>not</em> be garbage.</p>
<p>So, as an <em>experiment</em>—no promises or warranties—I've set up an instance of the <a href="https://posativ.org/isso/">Isso</a> commenting engine to host a comments section at the bottom of each indivdual post page.</p>
<p>Don't make me regret this.</p>Relative Gratitude and the Great Plague of 20202020-03-22T22:20:00-07:002020-03-22T22:20:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-03-22:/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/<p>In the depths of despair over not just having lost the Category War, but having lost it harder and at higher cost than I can even yet say (having not yet applied for clearance from the victors as to how much is my story to tell), I'm <em>actually</em> pretty impressed …</p><p>In the depths of despair over not just having lost the Category War, but having lost it harder and at higher cost than I can even yet say (having not yet applied for clearance from the victors as to how much is my story to tell), I'm <em>actually</em> pretty impressed with how competently my filter bubble is handling the pandemic. When the stakes of <em>getting the right answer for the right reasons, in public</em> is measured in the hundreds of thousands of horrible suffocation deaths, you can see the discourse <em>usefully</em> move forward on the timescale of days.</p>
<p>In the simplest epidemiology models, the main parameter of interest is called <em>R<sub>0</sub></em>, the <em>basic reproduction number</em>: the number of further infections caused by every new infection (at the start of the epidemic, when no one is yet immune). <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> isn't just a property of the disease itself, but also of the population's behavior. If <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> is above 1, the ranks of the infected grow exponentially; if <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> is less the 1, the outbreak peters out.</p>
<p>So first the narrative was "flatten the curve": until a vaccine is developed, we can't <em>stop</em> the virus, but with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_distancing">social distancing</a>, frequent handwashing, not touching your face, <em>&c.</em> we can at least lower <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> to <em>slow down</em> the course of the epidemic, making the graph of curent infections at time <em>t</em> flatter and wider: if fewer people are sick <em>at the same time</em>, then the hospital system won't be overloaded, and fewer people will die.</p>
<p>The thing is, <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22flatten+the+curve%22&tbm=isch">the various "flatten the curve" propaganda charts</a> illustrating the idea didn't label their axes and depicted the "hospital system capacity" horizontal line above, or at most slightly below, the peak of the flattened curve, suggesting a scenario where mitigation efforts that merely slowed down the spread of the virus through the population would be enough to avoid disaster. Turns out, <a href="https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727">when you run the numbers, that's too optimistic</a>: at the peak of a merely mitigated epidemic, there will be many times over more people who need intensive care, than ICU beds for them to get it. These cold equations <a href="https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56">suggest a more ambitious goal of "containment"</a>: <em>lock everything down</em> as hard as we need to in order to get <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> below 1, and scurry to get enough testing, contract-tracing, and quarantining infrastructure in place to support gradually restarting the economy without restarting the outbreak.</p>
<p>The discussion goes on (is it feasible to callibrate the response that finely?—what of the economic cost? <em>&c.</em>)—and that's what impresses me; that's what I'm grateful for. <em>The discussion goes on</em>. Sure, there's lots of the usual innumeracy, cognitive biases, and sheer wishful thinking, but when there's no strategic advantage to "playing dumb"—there's no pro-virus <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">coalition that might gain an advantage if we admit out loud that</a> they said something true—you can see people actually engage each other with <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/">the full beauty of our weapons</a>, and, sometimes, <em>change their mind in response to new information</em>. The "flatten the curve" argument isn't "false" exactly (quantitatively slowing down the outbreak will, in fact, quantitatively make the overload on hospitals less bad), but the pretty charts portraying the flattened curve safely below the hospital capacity line were <em>substantively misleading</em>, and it was possible for someone to spend a bounded <em>and small</em> amount of effort to explain, "Hey, this is substantively misleading because ..." and <em>be heard</em>, to the extent that <a href="https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/14-03-2020/after-flatten-the-curve-we-must-now-stop-the-spread-heres-what-that-means/">the people who made one of the most popular "flatten the curve" charts published an updated version reflecting the new argument</a>.</p>
<p>This level of performance is ... not to be taken for granted. Take it from me.</p>Cloud Vision2020-02-24T05:00:00-08:002020-02-24T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-02-24:/2020/Feb/cloud-vision/<p>Google reportedly <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22373635">recently</a> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f6pyiu/cloud_vision_api_will_not_return_gendered_labels/">sent</a> out an email to their <a href="https://cloud.google.com/vision">Cloud Vision API</a> customers, notifying them that the service will stop returning "woman" or "man" labels for people in photos. Being charitable (as one does), I can think of reasons why I might defend or support such a decision. Detecting the …</p><p>Google reportedly <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22373635">recently</a> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/f6pyiu/cloud_vision_api_will_not_return_gendered_labels/">sent</a> out an email to their <a href="https://cloud.google.com/vision">Cloud Vision API</a> customers, notifying them that the service will stop returning "woman" or "man" labels for people in photos. Being charitable (as one does), I can think of reasons why I might defend or support such a decision. Detecting the sex of humans in images is going to significantly less reliable than just picking out the humans in the photo, and the way the machines do sex-classification is going to depend on their training corpus, which might contain embedded cultural prejudices that <a href="https://ai.google/principles/">Google might not want to</a> inadvertently use their technological hegemony to reproduce and amplify. Just using a "person" label dodges the whole problem.</p>
<p>I think of my experience playing with <a href="https://www.faceapp.com/">FaceApp</a>, the <em>uniquely best piece of software in the world</em>, which lets the user apply neural-network-powered transformations to their photos to see how their opposite-sex analogue would look! (Okay, the software actually has lots of other transformations and filters available—aging, de-aging, add makeup, add beard, lens flare, <em>&c.</em>—but I'm assuming those are just there for plausible deniability.) So, for example, the "Female" transformation hallucinates long hair—but hair length isn't sexually dimorphmic the way facial morphology is! At <em>most</em>, the "females have long hair" <a href="/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/">convention has a large basin of attraction</a>—but the corpus of training photos were taken from a culture following that convention. Is it OK for the AI's concept of womanhood itself to reflect that? There are all sorts of deep and subtle ethical questions about "algorithmic fairness" that could be asked here!</p>
<p>I don't think the deep and subtle questions are being asked. The reigning ideology does not <em>permit itself the expressive power</em> to <em>formulate</em> the deep and subtle questions. "Given that a person's gender cannot be inferred by appearance," reads the email. <em>Cannot</em> be inferred, says Google! This is either insane, or a blatant lie told to appease the insane. Neither bodes well for the future of my civilization. (Contrast to sane versions of the concern, like, "Cannot be inferred with sufficiently high reliability", or, "Can be inferred in most cases, but we're concerned about the social implications of misclassifying edge cases.") I'm used to this shit from support groups at the queer center in Berkeley or in Portland, but I never really took it seriously—never really believed that it <em>could</em> be taken seriously. But Google! Aren't those guys supposed to know math?</p>
<p>Just ... this <em>fucking</em> ideology that assumes everyone has this "gender" thing that's <em>incredibly important for everyone to respect and honor</em>, but otherwise has <em>no particular properties whatsoever</em>. I can sketch out an argument for why, in theory, the ideology is <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">memetically fit</a>: there are <a href="/tag/two-type-taxonomy/">at least two</a> (and probably three or four) clusters of motivations for why some humans want to change sex; liberal-individualist Society wants to accomodate them and <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#blue-egregore">progressives want to use them as a designated-victim pity-pump</a>, but the inadequacy of the existing continuum of interventions, and perhaps more so the <em>continuity</em> of the menu of available interventions, is such that <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">verbal self-identification ends up being the only stable Schelling point</a>.</p>
<p>But the theory doesn't help me wrap my head about how <em>grown-ups actually believe this shit</em>. Or at least, are too scared to be caught dead admitting out loud that they don't. This is <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2671118186">Cultural Revolution</a> shit! This is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism">Lysenko</a>-tier mindfuckery up in here!</p>
<p>And I don't know how to convey, to anyone who doesn't already feel it too, that I'm <em>scared</em>—and that I have a <em>reason</em> to be scared.</p>
<p>I believe that knowledge is useful, and that there are <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms"><em>general</em> algorithms</a>—patterns of thinking and talking—that produce knowledge. You can't just get <em>one</em> thing wrong—every wrong answer comes from a bug in your <em>process</em>, and there's an infinite family of other inputs that could trigger the same bug. <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to">The calculator that says <code>6 + 7 = 14</code></a> isn't just going to mislead you if you use it to predict what happens when you combine a stack of ●●●●●● pennies and a stack of ●●●●●●● pennies—it's <em>not a calculator</em>. The function-that-it-computes is <em>not arithmetic</em>.</p>
<p>I am not particularly intelligent man. If I ever seem to be saying true and important things that almost no one else is saying, it's not because I'm unusually insightful, but because I'm unusually bad at keeping secrets. There are ... <em>operators</em> among us, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200428132642/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/">savvy</a> Straussian motherfuckers who know and see everything I can, and more—but who think <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter">it doesn't matter</a> that <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">not everybody knows</a>.</p>
<p>And I guess ... I think it matters? <a href="https://blog.jim.com/economics/draining-the-swamp-2/">One of the evilest reactionary bloggers mentioned the difference</a> between a state religion that requires you to believe in the unseen, and one that requires you to disbelieve in what is seen. My thesis is that a state religion that requires you to fluidly doublethink around the implications of "Some women have penises", will also falter over something even the Straussians have <a href="/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/">to protect</a>. But I can't prove it.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019">COVID-19</a> news is playing hell with my neuroticism. <a href="https://virologydownunder.com/past-time-to-tell-the-public-it-will-probably-go-pandemic-and-we-should-all-prepare-now/">They say</a> you should stock up on needed prescription drugs, in case of supply-chain disruptions. I guess I'm glad that, unlike some of my friends who I am otherwise jealous of, I'm not dependent on drugs for the hormones that my body needs in order for my bones to not rot. I wish I had <em>known</em> tweleve years ago, that accepting that dependency in exchange for its scintillating benefits was an <em>option</em> for cases like mine. There's at least a consistency in this: it's <em>not safe</em> to depend on the supply lines of a system that didn't have the all-around competency to <a href="/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/">just tell me</a>.</p>
<p>Anyway, <em>besides</em> the <a href="/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/">Total Culture War over the future of my neurotype</a> tearing apart ten-year friendships and having me plotting to flee my hometown, my life is going pretty okay. I'm getting paid lots of money to sell insurance in Canada, and I have lots of things to look forward to, like the conclusion to the <em>Tangled</em> sequel series, or the conclusion to the <em>Obnoxious Bad Decision Child</em> sequel miniseries, or finishing my forthcoming review of the new Charles Murray book. (It's going to be great—a bid to broaden the topic scope of the blog to "things that only right-wing Bad Guys want to talk about, but without myself being a right-wing Bad Guy" in <em>full generality</em>, not just for autogynephila and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names">correspondence of language to reality</a>.)</p>
<p>Basically, <em>I want to live</em>. I know that now. And it's hard to shake the feeling that the forces trying to cloud my vision don't want me to.</p>If in Some Smothering Dreams You Too Could Pace2020-02-23T23:55:00-08:002020-02-23T23:55:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-02-23:/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/<blockquote>
<p>[...] <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking">and this is a war, and we are soldiers</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fighting a Total Culture War to prevent your neurotype-demographic from becoming permanent mind-slaves of the <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#blue-egregore">Blue Egregore</a> is no excuse for being a jerk.</p>
<p>I mean, it's an explanation, but that's different from an excuse: being a jerk <a href="https://xkcd.com/1357/">has consequences</a>, and …</p><blockquote>
<p>[...] <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking">and this is a war, and we are soldiers</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fighting a Total Culture War to prevent your neurotype-demographic from becoming permanent mind-slaves of the <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#blue-egregore">Blue Egregore</a> is no excuse for being a jerk.</p>
<p>I mean, it's an explanation, but that's different from an excuse: being a jerk <a href="https://xkcd.com/1357/">has consequences</a>, and you need to take the consequences like a man.</p>
<p>This, then, is the mindset of a soldier (though our <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/">beautiful cutting weapons</a> be words instead of swords): to inflict pain, to incur guilt—and yet to have <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2020/02/relationship-outcomes-are-not-particularly-sensitive-to-small-variations-in-verbal-ability/">only tactical</a> regrets. Given the chance to do it all over again, you would—but solely to be more skillful in projecting rhetorical force to secure the objective, to say more clearly what <em>needed to be said</em>. Not to inflict less pain or incur less guilt.</p>Book Review: Cailin O'Connor's The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution2020-01-20T22:20:00-08:002020-01-20T22:20:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2020-01-20:/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/<p><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-unfairness-9780198789970">This is a <em>super-great book</em></a> about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender roles! (And also stuff like race and religion and caste, I guess, but I'm ignoring that because I haven't gotten around to broadening the topic scope of this blog yet.) I am <em>unreasonably excited about this book …</em></p><p><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-unfairness-9780198789970">This is a <em>super-great book</em></a> about the cultural evolutionary game theory of gender roles! (And also stuff like race and religion and caste, I guess, but I'm ignoring that because I haven't gotten around to broadening the topic scope of this blog yet.) I am <em>unreasonably excited about this book</em> for supplying the glue of <em>analytical rigor</em> to a part of my world-model that had previously been held together by threads of mere handwaving! (Three years ago on this blog, I wrote, <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/#views-have-changed">"social-role defaults are inevitably going to accrete around [sex differences]"</a>, but I didn't, and couldn't, have told you <em>how and why</em> in a form suitable for verification by computer simulation.)</p>
<p>In this blog post, I'm going to summarize what I learned from <em>Origins of Unfairness</em> in my own words, but if you want to be a serious intellectual who actually reads grown-up books rather than relying on some pseudonymous <em>nobody's</em> blog summary, you should <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07V5Q6R62/">go buy the source material</a>!</p>
<hr>
<p>A puzzle: every human culture has gender roles and a substantial amount of division of labor by sex. From <em>within</em> a particular culture, it might be tempting to "essentialize" these differences, to think that certain kinds of tasks inherently belong in the separate spheres of women or men, as ordained by the local religion's gods (or perhaps "evolution" if your local religion is pop-evopsych rather than real-evopsych). But anthropologists know that there's huge cross-cultural variation as to the details of what tasks are assigned to which sex. There are some regularities: things like big-game hunting and metalworking are always male tasks, and things like spinning, dairying, and primary child care are "women's work." But there are also a lot of differences: the task of making ropes or pottery is gendered <em>within</em> a culture, but different cultures end up making different assignments.</p>
<p>What's going on here? Why divide labor by sex when either sex is capable of doing the job? Why not let individuals choose their own destinies, independently of how their genitals are shaped?</p>
<p>Observe that the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour">division and specialization of labor</a> is a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Coordination_Problems">coordination problem</a>: there are many ways to try to produce stuff, but Society is richer when people choose ways that "fit together": our tribe is more likely to survive if I hunt and you gather <em>or</em> you hunt and I gather, rather than if we try to both hunt (too much variance) or both gather (not enough protein). Moreover, the division of labor is a <em>complementary</em> coordination problem, where we want different people do <em>different</em> things that fit together (like hunting and gathering in a nomadic society, or cooking and cleaning in a household), in contrast to <em>correlative</em> coordination problems where we want people to all end up doing the <em>same</em> thing that fits together (like driving on the right side of the road, or meeting <a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/#schelling-point">at noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station</a>).</p>
<p>Consider a population of agents that meet in pairs and play a complementary coordination game, like ballroom dancers that need to decide <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_and_follow">who should lead and who should follow</a>. It's kind of a pain if every single pair has to separately negotiate roles every time they meet! But if the agents come in two equally numerous <em>types</em> (say, "women" and "men"), then the problem is easy: either of the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/convention/">conventions</a> "men lead, women follow" or "women lead, men follow" solves the problem for everyone!</p>
<p>Of course, "women and men dancing" is just an illustrative example as far as the <em>theory</em> is concerned: the "types" here are just opaque tags that separate otherwise-identical abstract agents into groups. In particular, types are <em>not</em> strategies. In terms of the dancing game, the <em>strategies</em> "lead" and "follow" can't be types: rather, the arbitrary "men" and "women" tags (which might as well be <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/Truly-Part-Of-You">suggestively-named Lisp tokens</a>) are a symmetry-breaking hack that lets us turn <em>many</em> complementary coordination games (for <em>every pair</em>, who should lead?) into a <em>single</em> correlative coordination game (for the whole population, are we using the "men lead" or the "women lead" convention?).</p>
<p>Nor does there need to be a central "dance caller" who specifies which convention the population should follow. If strategies that are more successful are more frequently <em>imitated</em> via social learning, conventions can arise from a process of cultural evolution: in a world where most men happen to lead, women learn to follow in order to have a successful dance, and the population gets swept in to the "men lead" convention. A convention's <a href="http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Basin_of_attraction">basin of attraction</a> is the set of initial population conditions that lead to the evolution of that convention. When there are many possible equilibria with roughly-equal-sized basins of attraction, the outcome is highly "conventional": things could have easily been otherwise given different initial conditions. (And can even be said to <em>contain more information</em>: "more possible outcomes" and "equally-probable outcomes" are what maximize <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)">entropy</a>.) Situations with fewer, unequally-sized basins of attraction are more "functional": the outcome is mostly determined by the game itself.</p>
<p>And that's where gender roles come from! In a Society facing complementary coordination problems in production, gender is <em>the symmetry-breaker around which conventions form</em>. And if skills need to be trained long before they get put into production, that shapes early socialization—in a Society where women do "women's work" to complement "men's work", they're raised to start practicing it as girls.</p>
<p>This is also where gender <em>inequality</em> comes from. In game theory models <em>without</em> types, all agents get the same payoffs in equilibrium. (Because if they didn't, then some strategy must pay better than others—which means more agents will copy it until it doesn't.)</p>
<p>With types, this is no longer true: the population can settle on equilibria that favor the interests of one type over another (but are better for everyone than the absence of coordination), like an "always Bach" convention in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_sexes_(game_theory)">the Bach–Stravinsky game</a>, or in the aggregation of <a href="/2019/Dec/more-schelling/"><em>many</em> games that the type tags are being used for</a>.</p>
<p><a id="threatpoints-and-bargaining"></a>This is especially true if we drop the assumption that the type "tags" have no in-game significance (other than being visible for coordination) and introduce an asymmetric payoff matrix. Consider the Nash bargaining game: two agents have to decide how to divide a pie with 10 slices, but if their demands are incompatible (like when I demand 7 slices and you also demand 7 slices, but 7 + 7 = 14 is greater than 10), then the pie explodes, and no one gets any pie. If different types of agents have different fallback options, that affects their incentives in the bargaining game: if you wouldn't have anything to eat if you didn't get any pie, then you might want to make a conservative demand, like 3 slices, in order to ensure that you get <em>some</em> pie even if it turns out that I'm a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices. But if I have a sandwich that's as valuable to me as 2½ slices of pie, then I'm not particularly worried about you being a greedy jerk who demands 7 slices: to me, the difference between a successful 3-slice demand and failing to make a deal at all is only half a slice, which gives me an incentive to demand more, because I have less to lose than you if bargaining fails.</p>
<p>This kind of dynamic explains <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/hoe-cultures-a-type-of-non-patriarchal-society/">the differences in women's roles between patriarchal "plow cultures" (in which men do agriculture with plows) and non-patriarchal "hoe cultures" (in which women do horticulture with hoes)</a>: a coordination equilibrium in which Society's primary means of sustenance is considered "women's work" gives women more negotiating power <em>as a class</em>. (Even when individual women in a <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/">patriarchal</a> Society have high privilege (<em>e.g.</em>, earning power), they're still women as far as conventions are concerned.)</p>
<p>The path of cultural evolution is affected not only by the types' bargaining power: the relative <em>speed</em> of adaptation between types can matter, too! The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis">Red Queen hypothesis</a> describes an evolutionary advantage to a species that can evolve quickly, the better to keep up in an evolutionary arms race against parasites. (As it happens, this may have been a key factor in the evolution of sexual reproduction—the reason, along with the <a href="http://www.evolutionary-ecology.com/abstracts/v01/1021.html">dynamic instability of equal-sized gametes</a>, that "females" and "males" even exist to begin with, rather than all organisms being asexual clones.) But in bargaining-like situations, there can be a "Red King" effect in which there's an advantage in evolving <em>slowly</em>. Much like how visibly throwing away your steering wheel is an advantage in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)">the game of Chicken</a> (that precomitment forcing your opponent to swerve in response), the type that is slower to adapt to its "counterparty" type is effectively more resistant to its bargaining demands. As O'Connor puts it, "we can think of a fast-evolving species as swerving in evolutionary time."</p>
<p>Similarly, when a minority group (for example, women in a male-dominated workplace) interacts with a majority, a large fraction of a minority group member's interactions will be with members of the majority: the minority learns to adapt to the majority much faster than <em>vice versa</em>, placing the evolutionarily implicit norm negotiation on the majority's terms.</p>
<hr>
<p>A sign of high-integrity scholarship is when the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_statement">positive</a> insights contained in a work can be appreciated independently of the author's normative agenda (if any). O'Connor, like me—at least, I <em>hope</em> my self-identification in this matter is still valid, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—writes from a position of having a <a href="/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/">glorious vision of gender equality</a> as <a href="/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/">Something to Protect</a>, her mighty pen wielded in the service of that ideal in an act of heroic scholarship.</p>
<p>But having Something to Protect is the same thing as having something in danger. This is—as mathematical sociology treatises go—a very <em>dark</em> book. O'Connor repeatedly emphasizes that the theory presented in the book shows how inequality can emerge <em>and persist</em> under <em>very</em> minimal conditions—with "no bias in [the] model, no stereotype threat, not much psychology in general"—in contrast to theories that present injustice as the consequence of unique malice or prejudice, rather than <em>mathematics</em>.</p>
<p>"Ultimately," she writes, "I will present a picture in which social justice is an endless battle. The forces of cultural evolution can pull populations towards inequity, and combating those forces requires constant vigilance." The book concludes, "The battle for social justice is against a hydra that grows a new head each time any one is cut off."</p>
<p>When I imagine an intelligent arch-reactionary reading <em>Origins of Unfairness</em> (perhaps <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DastardlyWhiplash">twiddling his mustache</a> during an hour of study between a 2:30 <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KickTheDog">dog-kicking appointment</a> and 4 o'clock <a href="https://blog.jim.com/politics/the-likely-shape-of-a-trump-autocoup/">advocacy of a Trump <em>coup d'état</em></a>), I see him nodding along thoughtfully at the lucid prose explaining the underlying game theory insights (in between cringing at the occasional Judith Butler and stereotype-threat cites). That man, in the service of callously protecting his personal power and privilege, might construe <em>Origins</em> as "supporting" <em>his</em> ideology.</p>
<p>"Bwah-ha-ha!" he laughs maniacally. "I already knew that feminism was doomed simply due to the nature and meaning of male and female—but I had no idea it was <em>further</em> doomed as a result of the <em>cultural evolutionary game theory of complementary coordination problems!</em> And this, from one of the corrupt leftist establishment's own scholaresses! Priceless!"</p>
<p><em>That's how you know it's a good book</em>. The map that reflects the territory is equally useful to good people and to bad men. Good and evil—as <em>we</em> would define those terms—exist in the same material universe, whose exceptionless physical laws contain no provision for biologically <em>and culturally</em> evolved human notions of mercy or fairness. The long arc of the moral universe points, not towards justice, but towards maximum entropy—just like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)">the arrow of time in every other universe</a>.</p>
<p>A lesser scholar, flinching from this terrible truth, might have seen fit to fudge their results, to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting">select</a> their modeling assumptions to present a softer narrative, something that would make better propaganda for the Blue Team ...</p>
<p>It wouldn't have worked. I mean, it probably would have worked <em>as propaganda</em>, but it wouldn't have worked in the sense of <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#a-dream-about-the-use-of-maps">my dream about the use of maps</a>—as scholarship, a beacon through the darkness, showing us the way to start to repair the world we actually live in, and not only the appearance of it.</p>More Schelling2019-12-22T05:00:00-08:002019-12-22T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-22:/2019/Dec/more-schelling/<p><a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">(Previously.)</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>[A mediator] can influence the other players' expectations on his own initiative, in a manner that both parties cannot help mutually recognizing. When there is no apparent focal point for agreement, he can create one by his power to make a dramatic suggestion. [...]</p>
<p>The white line down the center …</p></blockquote><p><a href="/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">(Previously.)</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>[A mediator] can influence the other players' expectations on his own initiative, in a manner that both parties cannot help mutually recognizing. When there is no apparent focal point for agreement, he can create one by his power to make a dramatic suggestion. [...]</p>
<p>The white line down the center of the road is a mediator, and very likely it can err substantially toward one side or the other before the disadvantaged side finds advantage in denying its authority. The principle is beautifully illustrated by the daylight-saving-time controversy; a majority that want to do everything an hour earlier just cannot organize to do it unless it gets legislative control of the clock. And when it does, a well-organized minority that opposed the change is usually quite unable to offset the change in clock time by any organized effort to change the nominal hour at which it gets up, eats, and does business.</p>
<p>—Thomas Schelling, <em>Strategy of Conflict</em>, Ch. 5, "Enforcement, Communication, and Strategic Moves"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This explains why the trans-rights fight ends up focusing on language, rather than any particular policy where "gender" is used to make a decision. "What's the harm in calling people what they really want to be called?" goes the argument. "You can still say <em>cis woman</em> when you want to be more specific."</p>
<p>It doesn't work like that. When you <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/shoMpaoZypfkXv84Y/variable-question-fallacies">change the category associated with</a> a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes">short codeword</a>, you're imposing on all the downstream predictions and decisions people were <em>already</em> using that category/word for—nor have people catalogued all those decisions in advance; they just expect to be able to think using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns">top-20 nouns</a> (coordination signals) that came with their native tongue, much as how they expect to be able to think using clock time without needing to compute Earth's rate of rotation relative to the fixed stars. The skew between daylight-savings time and sidereal time would have to get pretty extreme before people started changing their schedules—or, if that were somehow forbidden, to deny the clock's authority and just start using the sun.</p>Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender2019-12-20T05:00:00-08:002019-12-20T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-20:/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/<blockquote>
<p>With the Hopes that our World is built on<br>
They were utterly out of touch,<br>
They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;<br>
They denied she identified as Dutch;<br>
They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;<br>
They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>With the Hopes that our World is built on<br>
They were utterly out of touch,<br>
They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;<br>
They denied she identified as Dutch;<br>
They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;<br>
They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings;<br>
So we worshipped the Gods of Culture<br>
Who promised these beautiful things.</p>
<p>—Rudyard Kipling, <a href="http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm">"The Gods of the Copybook Headings"</a> (paraphrased)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the end of <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">their reply</a> to <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">my reply</a> to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization</a>, <a href="/tag/ozy/">friend of the blog</a> Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-1-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-1 class=simple-footnote title="As teased at the beginning of the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year, I also have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in "Man Should Allocate Some More Categories". The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a ludicrously, miserably unproductive writer. (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the December 2019 (!) date of this one.)">1</a></sup> What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word <em>money</em>), and people advocating for a <em>different</em> money regime (like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate">late-19th century American bimetalists</a> or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic <em>mistake</em>.</p>
<p>I <em>really like</em> this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum">shell beads</a>, to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-2-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-2 class=simple-footnote title="E.g., my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.">2</a></sup></p>
<p>Because of these constraints, I don't think the money/social-gender analogy can do the work Ozy seems to expect of it. They write:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Similarly, "you're a woman if you identify as a woman!" is not a definition of womanhood. It is a criterion for who should be a woman. It states that our social genders should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says "I would like to be put in the 'woman' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied: a trans person's social gender generally depends on their presentation, their secondary sexual characteristics, and how much the cis people around them are paying attention. But perhaps it would improve things if it were.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Following the money analogy, we could imagine someone arguing that our money should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says, "I would like this to be put in the 'dollar' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied ... and it's not easy to imagine how it <em>could</em> be applied (a prerequisite to figuring out if perhaps it would improve things if it were). Could I buy a car by offering the dealer a banana and saying, "I would like this to be put in the '$20,000 bill' category now"? What would happen to the economy if everyone did that?</p>
<p>Maybe the hypothetical doesn't have to be that extreme. Perhaps we should imagine someone taking Canadian $5 bills, crossing out "Canada", drawing a beard on Wilfrid Laurier, and saying "I'd like <a href="/images/american_5_dollar_note.png">this</a> to be considered an American $5 bill." (Exchange rate at time of writing: 1 Canadian dollar = 0.76 U.S. dollars.) Then imagine that a social norm catches on within a certain subset of Society that it's <em>incredibly rude</em> to question someone who says they're giving you American money, but that this standard hasn't spread to the U.S. government and financial system.</p>
<p>Economists have a name for this kind of situation. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law">Gresham's Law</a>: bad money drives out good. In contexts where custom requires that defaced Canadian dollars be regarded as equivalent to U.S. dollars, maybe everyone will smile and pretend not to notice the difference.</p>
<p><em>They will be lying</em>. In marketplaces governed by "trans American dollars <em>are</em> American dollars" social norms, smart buyers will prefer to buy with defaced Canadian dollars, and smart sellers will try to find plausibly-deniable excuses to not accept them ("That'll be $5." "Here you go! A completely normal, definitely non-suspicious American $5 bill!" "<em>Ooh</em>, you know what, actually we <em>just</em> sold out"), because everyone knows<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-3-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-3 class=simple-footnote title="Except not everyone knows. What actually happens is that the original "U.S. dollar" concept coexists with the debased one, and savvy people who understand what's going on can arbitrage the equivocation to expropriate from those who are less savvy.">3</a></sup> that when it comes time to interact with the larger banking system, the two types of dollars won't be regarded as being of equal value. Never doubting the value of other people's currency may be basic human decency, but if so, the market <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore">interprets basic human decency as damage and routes around it</a>.</p>
<p>Similarly, there seem to be increasingly large subsets of Society in which it's <em>incredibly rude</em> to question someone's stated gender. But even if everyone <em>says</em> "Trans women are women" and uses the right pronouns solely on the basis of self-reported self-identity with no questions asked and no one batting an eye, it's not clear that this constitutes successfully entering a "fully consensual gender" regime insofar as people following their own self-interest are likely to systematically make <em>decisions</em> that treat non-well-passing trans women as if they were something more like men, even if no one would dream of being so rude as to <em>admit out loud</em> that that's what they're doing.</p>
<p>And how are you going to stop them? Every freedom-to implies the lack of a freedom-from somewhere else, and <em>vice versa</em>: as the cliché goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. "Fully consensual gender" <em>sounds</em> like a good idea when you <em>phrase</em> it like that: what kind of monster could possibly be against consent, or for non-consent?</p>
<p>But the word "consent" is usually used in contexts where an overwhelming asymmetry of interests makes us want to resolve conflicts in a particular direction every time: when we say that all sex should be consensual, we mean that a person's right to bodily autonomy <em>always</em> takes precedence over someone else's mere horniness. Even pointing out that this is (technically, like everything else) a trade-off, <a href="/papers/tetlock_et_al-psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf">feels creepy</a>.</p>
<p>Categorization really doesn't seem like this. If there's a conflict between one person's desire to be modeled as belonging to a particular gender and someone else's perception that the person is more accurately thought of as belonging to a different gender, then it's not clear what it would <em>mean</em> to resolve the conflict in the direction of "consent of the modeled" other than mind control, or at least compelled speech.</p>
<p>Ozy gives a list of predictions you can make about someone on the basis of social gender, as distinct from sex, apparently meant to demonstrate the usefulness of the former concept. But a lot of the individual list items seem either superficial ("Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup"—surely we don't want to go for "gender as clothing", do we??), or tied to other people's <em>perceptions</em> of sex.<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-4-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-4 class=simple-footnote title="The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression.">4</a></sup> <sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-5-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-5 class=simple-footnote title='Friend of the blog Ray Blanchard proposed on Twitter that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender".'>5</a></sup></p>
<p>Take the "How many messages they get on a dating site" item. The <em>reason</em> men send lots of messages to women on dating sites is because they want to date people with vaginas and female secondary sex characteristics, and maybe eventually marry them, father children with them, <em>&c.</em><sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-6-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-6 class=simple-footnote title="And the fact that it's women being deluged with messages from men rather than vice versa is predicted by the evolutionary logic of Bateman's principle and parental investment theory: the sex that invests more resources per offspring will be "choosier", and the sex that invests less will compete for them. There are a few species (like the pipefish or the Eurasian dotterel) in which males are the more-investing sex, but humans aren't one them.">6</a></sup></p>
<p>Suppose one were to say to such a man, "Ah, I see you're sending lots of messages to women, by which I mean people who self-identify as women, in accordance with the utilitarian-desirable social policy of fully-consensual gender. Therefore, you should also send messages to these non-op trans women who aren't on HRT."</p>
<p>I think the man would reply, "How dumb do you think I am?!"<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-7-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-7 class=simple-footnote title="This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—many such men might be happy to date trans women who were on HRT and thereby came to more closely rememble cis/natal/actual women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender.">7</a></sup></p>
<p>One might respond with, "But there's a lot of cis women who you <em>also</em> wouldn't date. Therefore, while you're allowed to not date trans women if that's your preference, you can't say it's because they're not <em>women</em>."</p>
<p>So, I think there's actually a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy">statistically sophisticated reply to this</a> which I really need to elaborate on more in future posts. To be sure, our man is just relying on his intuitive perception and probably doesn't <em>know</em> the statistically sophisticated reply<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-8-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-8 class=simple-footnote title="Although I would argue that the sophisticated statistics are part of the cognitive-scientific explanation of what he perceives.">8</a></sup>—but it's not clear that we've given him much of a reason to trust our clever verbal arguments over his own perception.</p>
<p>I happily agree that fully consensual gender is a <em>coherent</em> position. That doesn't make it <em>feasible</em>. <em>How</em> are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being <em>immediately</em> destroyed by normal people who <em>have eyes</em> and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking mind games the way that readers of this blog do?</p>
<p>That's not a rhetorical question. In the case of fiat currency, the question <em>actually has a literal answer</em>, although I personally am not well-versed enough in economic history to tell it. <em>Somehow</em>, societies have evolved from a condition in which the idea of paper currency would have provoked a "How dumb do you think I am?" reaction, to the present condition where everyone <em>and her dog</em> accepts paper money as money without a thought—where the "somehow" <em>probably</em> involves the use of state violence to enforce banking regulations.</p>
<p>Ozy concludes—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since it is not, properly speaking, a definition, the decision of who should be socially gendered male or female, and how many social genders we should have is not an epistemic decision. This decision can and should be made on purely utilitarian grounds.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In some sense, this is kind of unobjectionable—what kind of monster could possibly be against <em>utility</em>?!—but it's an <em>incredibly vague</em> sense. The decision of what kind of money we should have should be made on purely utilitarian grounds, but the set of possible solutions to that problem, and how well each solution performs with respect to the global utilitarian calculus, is <em>very tightly constrained</em> by many <em>facts</em> of economics and sociology.<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-9-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-9 class=simple-footnote title="For example, fiat money lets central banks exert greater control over the money supply, but can suffer disastrous hyperinflation under the wrong conditions.">9</a></sup></p>
<p>So too with gender. "Utilitarian grounds" does <em>not</em> mean, "I and some other people have an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Conflict_of_Visions&oldid=915640693#The_unconstrained_vision">unconstrained utopian vision</a>, and we'll be <em>very</em> dysphoric if you don't implement it, so the global utilitarian calculus says you should obey us." To be sure, your dysphoria is <em>a</em> cost under the global utilitarian calculus—but it's just one of <em>many</em> costs and benefits in a complex system. If someone <em>actually</em> wants to do a careful psychologically- and sociologically-informed analysis of how a "fully consensual gender" regime could actually be implemented in real life,<sup id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-10-back><a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-10 class=simple-footnote title="As I observed recently, fully consensual gender would at least have the advantage of being a Schelling point. Oh, and speaking of "real life", I happily concede that the social-engineering problem of fully consensual gender is much easier in online communities, where pesky easy-to-detect/expensive-to-change secondary sex characteristics are hidden behind the fog of net. In other words, on the internet, nobody knows you're a G.I.R.L..">10</a></sup> and what impact it would have in terms of QALYs, that would be really interesting to read!</p>
<p>Until then, the question remains: how dumb do you think we are?!</p><hr><p id=notes-header>Notes</p><ol class=simple-footnotes><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-1>As teased at the beginning of <a href="/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list">the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year</a>, I <em>also</em> have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">"Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"</a>. The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a <a href="/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/">ludicrously, <em>miserably</em> unproductive writer</a>. (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the December 2019 (!) date of this one.) <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-1-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-2><em>E.g.</em>, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-2-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-3>Except <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">not everyone knows</a>. What actually happens is that the original "U.S. dollar" concept <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/">coexists with the debased one</a>, and savvy people who understand what's going on can arbitrage the equivocation to <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blame-games/">expropriate from those who are less savvy</a>. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-3-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-4>The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-4-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-5><a href="https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528">Friend of the blog</a> Ray Blanchard <a href="https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1054743819206434816">proposed on Twitter</a> that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender". <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-5-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-6>And the fact that it's women being deluged with messages from men rather than vice versa is predicted by the evolutionary logic of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman's_principle">Bateman's principle</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_investment">parental investment theory</a>: the sex that invests more resources per offspring will be "choosier", and the sex that invests less will compete for them. There are a few species (like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipefish">pipefish</a> or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_dotterel">Eurasian dotterel</a>) in which males are the more-investing sex, but humans aren't one them. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-6-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-7>This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—many such men might be happy to date trans women who were <em>on HRT</em> and thereby came to more closely rememble <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/">cis/natal/actual</a> women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-7-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-8>Although I would argue that the sophisticated statistics are part of the cognitive-scientific <em>explanation</em> of what he perceives. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-8-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-9>For example, fiat money lets central banks exert greater control over the money supply, but can suffer disastrous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation">hyperinflation</a> under the wrong conditions. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-9-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-10>As I observed recently, fully consensual gender would at least have the advantage of <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/">being a Schelling point</a>. Oh, and speaking of "real life", I happily concede that the social-engineering problem of fully consensual gender is <em>much</em> easier in online communities, where pesky <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/">easy-to-detect/expensive-to-change</a> secondary sex characteristics are hidden behind the fog of net. In other words, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog">on the internet, nobody knows</a> you're a <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GIRL">G.I.R.L.</a>. <a href=#reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-note-10-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li></ol>Comp2019-12-18T05:00:00-08:002019-12-18T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-18:/2019/Dec/comp/<p><em>(-romise, -ensation)</em></p>
<p><em>(epistemic status: shitposting)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://archive.is/N1kM5">Some radical feminists complain</a> that males body-modding to become facsimiles of women is appropriation. They're obviously correct, but the claim doesn't seem strong enough to override the right to bodily autonomy. The Law in its majesty finds a precedent in the archives of copyright law …</p><p><em>(-romise, -ensation)</em></p>
<p><em>(epistemic status: shitposting)</em></p>
<p><a href="https://archive.is/N1kM5">Some radical feminists complain</a> that males body-modding to become facsimiles of women is appropriation. They're obviously correct, but the claim doesn't seem strong enough to override the right to bodily autonomy. The Law in its majesty finds a precedent in the archives of copyright law: bands recording cover songs are appropriating the work of the original composer, but the composer's claim to control and be compensated for their work doesn't seem strong enough to override the band's right to artistic expression.</p>
<p>The solution in either case: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license">compulsory licensing</a>! A small tax is administered on transition services (hormone replacement therapy, facial feminization surgery, <em>&c</em>.), the proceeds of which are distributed equally amongst all natal females (as if they held a collective patent on the female form).</p>Promises I Can Keep2019-12-16T05:00:00-08:002019-12-16T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-16:/2019/Dec/promises-i-can-keep/<p>"I think if you show any indications of being an egg, you <em>need</em> to marry someone who's OK with you eventually transitioning. Not because you necessarily <em>will</em> want to transition, but because it's likely enough that you need to plan for it."</p>
<p>"I probably don't actually <em>disagree</em>. Keeping promises is …</p><p>"I think if you show any indications of being an egg, you <em>need</em> to marry someone who's OK with you eventually transitioning. Not because you necessarily <em>will</em> want to transition, but because it's likely enough that you need to plan for it."</p>
<p>"I probably don't actually <em>disagree</em>. Keeping promises is very important. What a betrayal it would be—to take someone to have and to hold, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health—only to <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">throw it all away when the cost curve moves</a>? No. But in the spirit of <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided">policy debates not appearing one-sided</a>, I would like to register a note of sadness that we're effectively thereby saying 'eggs don't deserve love.'"</p>
<p>"Eggs can have love, they just add a constraint."</p>
<p>"I don't think you understand <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xqJqZgowy5pPxNNst/inconvenience-is-qualitatively-bad">the seriousness of 'just' adding a constraint</a> to a search problem that is <a href="/2017/Oct/select/">already very constrained</a>. Constraint: must own unicorn."</p>"I Want to Be the One"2019-12-14T05:00:00-08:002019-12-14T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-14:/2019/Dec/i-want-to-be-the-one/<p><em>This life is not to last and it awaits apotheosis<br>
And the passerby all sipping on their Monday coffee know this<br>
Their stumbling through their week<br>
Contrasts the path by which I seek<br>
A practical ambition<br>
For a special type of girl<br>
I want to be the one who writes …</em></p><p><em>This life is not to last and it awaits apotheosis<br>
And the passerby all sipping on their Monday coffee know this<br>
Their stumbling through their week<br>
Contrasts the path by which I seek<br>
A practical ambition<br>
For a special type of girl<br>
I want to be the one who writes the code<br>
That writes the code<br>
That writes the code<br>
That ends the world</em></p>
<p><a href="/images/i_want_to_be_the_one.png"><img src="/images/i_want_to_be_the_one.png" alt="sheet music" width="600"></a></p>On the Argumentative Form "Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties"2019-12-13T05:00:00-08:002019-12-13T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-13:/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/<blockquote>
<p>"[...] Between one and the infinite in cases such as these, there are no sensible numbers. Not only two, but any finite number, is ridiculous and can't exist."</p>
<p>—<em>The Gods Themselves</em> by Isaac Asimov</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512">Eliezer Yudkowsky Tweets</a> (back in March), linking to <a href="https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/">a <em>Quillette</em> interview with Lisa Littman</a> (positer of "rapid …</p><blockquote>
<p>"[...] Between one and the infinite in cases such as these, there are no sensible numbers. Not only two, but any finite number, is ridiculous and can't exist."</p>
<p>—<em>The Gods Themselves</em> by Isaac Asimov</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512">Eliezer Yudkowsky Tweets</a> (back in March), linking to <a href="https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/an-interview-with-lisa-littman-who-coined-the-term-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria/">a <em>Quillette</em> interview with Lisa Littman</a> (positer of "rapid onset gender dysphoria"):</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108277090577600512">Everything more complicated than</a> protons tends to come in varieties. Hydrogen, for example, has isotopes. Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1108280619014905857">To be clear, I don't</a> know much about gender dysphoria. There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria. To the extent that's not a strawman, I would say only in a generic way that GD seems liable to have more than one species.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, I actually think the moral here is wrong! (<em>Subtly</em> wrong, in a way that took me a day or two to notice at the time, and am blogging about now.)</p>
<p>It's true that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words">"in the real world, nothing above the level of [protons] repeats itself exactly."</a> But when we say that a psychological or medical diagnosis "comes in varieties," we're talking about distinct taxa/clusters, not the mere existence of variation due to things not being identical down to the atomic scale; otherwise, the observation that something "comes in varieties" would be trivial. And <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor">Occam's razor/minimum-message-length</a> says that we shouldn't postulate <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Atu4teGvob5vKvEAF/decoherence-is-simple">more explanatory entities</a> (such as categories) unless they can <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">pay rent</a> in better predictions.</p>
<p>There's a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule">"zero–one–infinity"</a>-like <em>reductio ad absurdum</em> argument to be made here. Suppose we observe some people <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/">wake up with their left arm turned into a blue tentacle</a>. We might want to coin a term like <em>tentacular brachitis</em> to summarize our observations.</p>
<p>The one comes to us and says, "Everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties. Tentacular brachitis involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties."</p>
<p>This, in itself, doesn't tell us anything useful about what those varieties might be ... but suppose we do some more research and indeed find that patients' tentacles have a distinct <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">cluster structure</a>. Not only is there <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covariance">covariance</a> between different tentacle features—perhaps tentacles that are a darker shade of blue also tend to be slimier—but the color–sliminess joint distribution is starkly bimodal: modeling the tentacles as coming from two distinct "dark-blue/slimy" and "light-blue/less-slimy" taxa is a better statistical fit than positing a linear darkness/sliminesss continuum. So, congratulating ourselves on a scientific job-well-done, we speciate our diagnosis into two: "Tentacular brachitis A" and "Tentacular brachitis B".</p>
<p>The one comes back to us and says, "Everything more complicated than protons tends to come in varieties. Tentacular brachitis A involves more than one proton and will probably have varieties."</p>
<p>You see the problem. We have an infinite regress: the argument that the original category will probably need to be split into subcategories, goes just as well for each of the subcategories.</p>
<p>So isn't "Gender dysphoria involves more than one proton[; therefore, it] will probably have varieties" a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fysgqk4CjAwhBgNYT/fake-explanations">fake explanation</a>? The phrase "gender dysphoria" was worth inventing as a <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/">shorter code</a> for the not-vanishingly-rare observation of "humans wanting to change sex", but unless and until you have specific observations indicating that there are meaningfully different ways dysphoria can manifest, you shouldn't posit that there are "probably" multiple varieties, because in a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the-winner-is-many-worlds">"nearby" Everett branch</a> where human evolution happened slightly differently, there probably <em>aren't</em>: brain-intersex conditions have a kind of <em>a priori</em> plausibility to them, but whatever weird quirk leads to autogynephilia probably wouldn't happen with every roll of the evolutionary dice if you rewound far enough, and the <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">memeplex</a> driving Littman's ROGD observations was invented recently.</p>
<p>So I think a better moral than "Things larger than protons will probably have varieties" would be "Beware <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression">fallacies of compression</a>." The advice to be alert to the <em>possibility</em> that your initial category should be split into multiple subspecies is correct and important and well-taken, but the <em>reason</em> it's good advice is not <em>because things are made of protons</em> (!?!).</p>
<p>At this point, some readers might be thinking, "Wait a minute, M. Taylor! Didn't you notice that part about 'There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria'? That's <a href="/tag/two-type-taxonomy/"><em>your</em> hobbyhorse</a>! Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist, by publicly offering a <em>general</em> argument that there are multiple types of dysphoria, he's <em>effectively</em> doing your cause a favor—and here you are <em>criticizing</em> him for it! Isn't that disloyal and ungrateful of you?"</p>
<p>Great question! And the answer is: <strong>no, absolutely not</strong>. (And, though I can never speak for anyone but myself, I can only <em>imagine</em> that Yudkowsky would agree? Everything I do, I <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/">learned from him</a>.) And the <em>reason</em> it's not disloyal and ungrateful is because the entire mindset in which arguments <em>can</em> constitute a political favor is a <em>confusion</em>. The map is not the territory; what's true is already so. You <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws">can't</a> make something <em>become true</em> by arguing for it; you can only <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument">use arguments to figure out what's true</a>.</p>
<p>The fact that <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/">not everybody knows this</a> makes it especially important for me to loudly and publicly dispute <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization">bad arguments whose conclusion I think is true</a> for <em>other reasons</em>. I don't <em>want</em> to trick people into accepting my <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line">bottom line</a> for fake reasons! What I want is for us all to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">get better at anticipating our experiences</a>. Together.</p>The Strategy of Stigmatization2019-12-12T05:00:00-08:002019-12-12T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-12:/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/<p>One common reaction by the Blanchpilled to autogynephilia-truther sites—I mean, the shouty sensationalist kind run by <a href="https://archive.is/PsTQP">conservatives</a> or <a href="https://outofmypantiesnow.wordpress.com/">radical</a> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/">feminists</a> that almost never use phrases like "uselessly low-dimensional subspace", not <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>—goes like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That is going to make the problem worse. We need …</p></blockquote><p>One common reaction by the Blanchpilled to autogynephilia-truther sites—I mean, the shouty sensationalist kind run by <a href="https://archive.is/PsTQP">conservatives</a> or <a href="https://outofmypantiesnow.wordpress.com/">radical</a> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/">feminists</a> that almost never use phrases like "uselessly low-dimensional subspace", not <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>—goes like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That is going to make the problem worse. We need to support honest autogynephiles earnestly trying to live satisfying and good lives. Don't try to shame them—we need more of them!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But what constitutes "the problem" depends on your goals, and the best response further depends on historically contingent features of the political environment.</p>
<p>A toy model: suppose there are three life trajectories available to AGP natal males:</p>
<p><strong>(1)</strong> Stay in the closet and quietly live in shame forever,<br>
<strong>(2)</strong> Transition but be transmedicalist/assimilationist/gatekeepy about it (think of this as the <a href="https://debbiehayton.wordpress.com/author/debbiehayton/">Debbie Hayton</a> or Anne Lawrence model), or<br>
<strong>(3)</strong> Go all-in on trans activism ("Some women have penises, get over it", <em>&c.</em>; the Danielle Muscato or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_McKinnon">Rachel McKinnon</a> model). </p>
<p>Which trajectory is taken is going to be partially <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">influenced by incentives</a>.</p>
<p>"This is going to make the problem worse" expresses the concern that the likes of /r/itsafetish push people from (2) to (3): if the option of both acknowledging and acting on AGP is "taken off the table", then the trans-activism coalition can "offer a better deal" than quietly living in shame forever.</p>
<p>But from the perspective of hard-core TERFs, (2) itself is <em>already</em> a loss: they're trying to push people from (2) to (1). Whether that's a strategic mistake on their part depends on whether the (2)→(3) "radicalization effect" is larger than the (2)→(1) "stigmatization effect". If it is a mistake in the Current Year (because it's better to seek favorable terms of surrender rather than risk the victor's wrath when the war is already effectively lost), it might not have been in Current Year Minus Five, or Minus Ten, <em>&c.</em>, when the coalition backing (3) was less powerful and therefore had a weaker bid.</p>Political Science Epigrams2019-12-11T23:30:00-08:002019-12-11T23:30:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-12-11:/2019/Dec/political-science-epigrams/<p>If your policy is, "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but we do appease bears", then from the perspective of a third party fighting a war against the bears, you look like a productive asset being farmed by the bears, and thus, a legitimate military target.</p>
<p>If your behavior is optimized …</p><p>If your policy is, "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but we do appease bears", then from the perspective of a third party fighting a war against the bears, you look like a productive asset being farmed by the bears, and thus, a legitimate military target.</p>
<p>If your behavior is optimized to respond to political threats, but not to small requests from your friends, at some point your friends start to face a strong incentive to stop being your friends and start threatening you politically, because you've made it clear from your behavior that that's all you respond to.</p>
<p>If you were angry at an enemy (who used to be a friend), you might throw a rock at them. But if they didn't react to the last rock, you need to patiently build a bigger rock.</p>Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point2019-10-06T20:35:00-07:002019-10-06T20:35:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-10-06:/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/<p>Previously on <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> (<a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"</a>, <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">"Reply on Adult Human Females"</a>), we've considered at length the ways in which the self-identity criterion for gender (<em>e.g.</em>, "Women are people who identify as women") fails to satisfy some of the …</p><p>Previously on <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> (<a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"</a>, <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">"Reply on Adult Human Females"</a>), we've considered at length the ways in which the self-identity criterion for gender (<em>e.g.</em>, "Women are people who identify as women") fails to satisfy some of the basic desiderata for useful categories: the <em>cognitive function</em> of categories is to group similar things together so that our brains can make similar predictions about them under conditions of uncertainty. In order to <em>make the case</em> that it's useful to think and speak such that "identifying as" a gender is the same thing as <em>being</em> of that gender, one would need to show that those who identify as a gender form a natural <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">cluster in configuration space</a>—and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">not just a uselessly low-dimensional subspace thereof</a>. ("Identifies as a woman" clusters with "prefers she/her pronouns", but if there's nothing <em>else</em> you can say about such people, then it's not clear why we care.)</p>
<p>Interestingly, a extension of this line of reasoning suggests an apparently novel argument in <em>favor</em> of the self-identity criterion—and which might go part of the way towards <em>explaining</em> many people's favorable attitudes towards the self-identity criterion, even if they've never formulated the argument explicitly. Let me explain.</p>
<p>(And please don't tell me you're surprised that I'm <a href="https://archive.is/jPmyd">inventing novel arguments for the position I've spent the last twenty months of my life obsessively arguing against</a>! Policy debates <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided">should not appear one-sided</a>: it is <em>by means of</em> searching for and weighing all relevant arguments, that one <em>computes</em> the optimal policy, and <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally">even generally terrible positions will have <em>some</em> arguments supporting them</a>. What did you take me for, some kind of <em>partisan hack?!</em>)</p>
<p>As, um, <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests">my favorite author on <em>Less Wrong</em> explains</a>, another desideratum for <em>intersubjectively</em> useful categories is being easy for different people to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game"><em>coordinate</em></a> on: in order to work together and <em>think</em> together, we don't just want to choose predictively-useful category boundaries, we also want to make the <em>same</em> choices.</p>
<p>The author gives the age of majority as an example. Presumably the right to vote should be based on <em>relevant</em> features of a person (in a word, "maturity"), not how many times the Earth has gone around the sun since they were born. But it wouldn't be practical for everyone to come to consensus on how to assess "maturity", whereas it <em>is</em> practical for everyone to come to consensus on how to subtract dates, so our <em>shared</em> socially-constructed category of "legal adulthood" ends up being defined in terms of a semi-arbitrary age cut-off, at the cost of mature 16-year-olds and immature 20-year-olds losing out on or gaining privileges that they should or shouldn't have (respectively).</p>
<p><a id="schelling-point"></a>When people need to coordinate on making the <em>same</em> arbitrary-on-the-merits choice, they tend to converge on an option that is (for whatever reason) unusually <em>salient</em>. This is the concept of a "Schelling point", after famed economist Thomas Schelling, who posed the question of where strangers should attempt to meet in New York, if they couldn't communicate to pick a rendezvous point in advance. The plurality answer turns out to be "noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station", not because of any properties that make Grand Central Station an objectively superior meeting place that you would pick even if you <em>could</em> communicate in advance, but just because its centrality makes it the focus of reasonable mutual expectations about what you and your partner are likely to do. Similarly, noon is salient as the midpoint of the day. There's no particular reason to meet at noon rather than 9 <em>a.m.</em> or 11 <em>a.m.</em> or 3 <em>p.m.</em>, <em>except</em> that choosing 9 or 11 or 3 would seem to demand a particular reason that you expect your counterpart to be able to derive independently.</p>
<p>We usually expect the question of what sex (or "gender") a person is to have a <em>canonical answer</em> that everyone agrees on: it would be pretty confusing for bystanders if I thought Pat was a woman and said "Pat ... she" and you thought Pat was a man and said "Pat ... he."</p>
<p>For transgender people who consistently <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(gender)"><em>pass</em></a>, this (<em>ex hypothesi</em>) isn't a problem. Unfortunately, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, not all aspiring trans people pass consistently: the <em>same person</em> might be perceived as their <a href="/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/">developmental sex</a> or their desired gender, depending on which observer you ask, how long the person has been on hormone replacement therapy, whether the observer knew the person before transition, the current lighting, or any number of other factors.</p>
<p>If, despite this, <a href="/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/">social reality</a> continues to require the question to have a definite canonical answer, and we can't appeal to "passing" because that's too subjective and blurry, the natural Schelling point is, "Just <em>ask</em> the person what gender they are, and that's what they are." Even if we <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/"><em>don't</em> assume that people know themselves better than anyone else</a>, people are still the focal point for reasonable mutual expectations about knowledge about themselves: if I claim to know Pat's gender better than she knows herself, and you claim to know Pat's gender better than <em>he</em> knows <em>himself</em>, then there's no more obvious way to break the symmetry except to defer the question to Pat.</p>
<p>(Notably, this is also the procedure you would use for non-trans people who just happen to be really-really androgynous: you're going to believe their answer to "Are you a woman or a man?" because if you could tell, then you wouldn't have asked.)</p>
<p>Schelling points are "sticky." If the set of possible choices is ordered, and it's possible to "move" from a currently-selected choice towards a "nearby" one, then the selected option may <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes">slide down a "slippery slope" until stopping at a Schelling point</a>. Imagine the armies of two countries fighting over contested territory containing a river. The river is a Schelling point for the border between the two countries: unless one of the armies has a military advantage to push the battle line forward to the <em>next</em> Schelling point, we expect peace-treaty negotiations to settle on the river as the border. There's no particular reason that the border couldn't be drawn 2 kilometers north of the river, <em>except</em> that that would invite the question of, "Why 2 kilometers? Why not 1, or 3?"</p>
<p>The coordination problem of how to decide what "gender" a person is, can be seen as a particular case of the problem of how to decide what gender a person is <em>in a particular context</em>. The notion of the same person's "gender" being different in different contexts may seem strange, but again, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, we <em>might</em> need it for some purposes: as far as the practice of medicine is concerned, for example, there's no getting around the fact that pregnant trans men are female. (Even if the doctors <em>address</em> the patient as "Mr.", "he", <em>&c.</em>, they still need to draw on their mental models of the human <em>female</em> body to practice their craft, which presupposes a <em>referent</em> for the concept of "human female body.")</p>
<p>But here we have a slippery slope on what domains within Society should use developmental-sex categories or self-identity categories.</p>
<p>At one extreme, a "Sex is immutable and determined by the presence of a Y chromosome, no exceptions" regime is a stable Schelling point: if you have a lab that can do karyotypes, there would be no ambiguity on how to classify anyone <em>with respect to</em> the stated category system. (It would be cruel to trans people and people with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome">complete androgen insensitivity syndrome</a>, but it would be a Schelling point.)</p>
<p>At the other extreme, "Self-reported self-identity only, no exceptions" is a stable Schelling point: <em>given</em> the self-identity criterion of "Just ask the person what gender they are", there's no ambiguity about how to classify anyone. (This requires us to affirm the existence of <a href="https://archive.is/Fpaw3">"female penises, female prostates, female sperm, and female XY chromosomes"</a>, but it's a Schelling point.)</p>
<p>In contrast, any of a number of "compromise" systems, while potentially performing better on edge cases, suffer from ambiguity and are on that account less game-theoretically stable. It's a lot harder for Society to establish a specific convention of the form "Okay, you can have your pronouns, but you can't use your target-gender {bathroom, locker room, sports league, hospital ward, <em>&c.</em>} unless you {pass really well, get bottom surgery, have a gender recognition certificate, <em>&c.</em>}", not only because different factions will disagree on where to draw the line for each particular gendered privilege, but also because any line not drawn on a sufficiently sticky Schelling point will face constant attempts to push it up or down the slippery slope.</p>Terminology Proposal: "Developmental Sex"2019-09-22T18:30:00-07:002019-09-22T18:30:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-09-22:/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/<p>We need a term to describe the property that cis women and trans men have in common with each other, and that cis men and trans women have in common with each other. I'm unhappy with all three of the most frequently-used alternatives.</p>
<p>The "mainstream" trans-rights answer to this seems …</p><p>We need a term to describe the property that cis women and trans men have in common with each other, and that cis men and trans women have in common with each other. I'm unhappy with all three of the most frequently-used alternatives.</p>
<p>The "mainstream" trans-rights answer to this seems to be "assigned sex at birth" or "assigned gender at birth" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy">hyponyms</a> "assigned female at birth", or a.f.a.b., and "assigned male at birth", a.m.a.b.). The problem with this is that it erases the concept of biological sex. "Assigned" seems (by design?) to suggest that doctors are making an arbitrary, possibly mistaken, choice. With the possible exception of some rare intersex conditions (the context in which the term was originally coined), this isn't the case: when we say that a baby is female, we're not <em>trying</em> to restrict the baby's future social roles or self-conception. We're <em>trying</em> to use language to express the <em>empirical observation</em> that the baby is, <em>in fact</em>, female (of the sex that produces ova).</p>
<p>Correspondingly, trans-skeptical authors (<em>e.g.</em>, gender-critical feminists) tend to use "biological sex." This is a <em>lot</em> better than "assigned", but the problem is that it seems to falsely imply that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) isn't "biological." But HRT does have a lot of <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy-female-hormones/">real</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_hormone_therapy_(male-to-female)">biological</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_hormone_therapy_(female-to-male)">effects</a> that make trans people resemble their "target" sex in a lot of ways—we don't want our terminology to erase <em>that</em>, either!</p>
<p>Other authors (<em>e.g.</em>, the indispensable <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/">Anne Lawrence</a>) use "natal sex", but that has the opposite problem: "natal" (of or relating to birth) could be too generous about the extent the extent to which HRT and surgeries actually change someone's sex. (Talking about the <em>historical</em> fact of someone's sex at birth might suggest that it's been successfully changed since.)</p>
<p>My proposal: "developmental sex" (in the sense of <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/developmental_biology">developmental biology</a>, "the study of the physiological changes that occur within individual organisms from their conception through reaching physical maturity"). Trans men (respectively women, <em>&c.</em>) weren't only <em>born</em> female; their bodies went through the female developmental trajectory until they transitioned. Hopefully this alternative solves all the problems and will help us communicate more clearly!</p>Does General Intelligence Deflate Standardized Effect Sizes of Cognitive Sex Differences?2019-09-01T22:50:00-07:002019-09-01T22:50:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-09-01:/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/<p>Marco del Giudice<sup id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-1-back><a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-1 class=simple-footnote title="I was telling friend of the blog Tailcalled the other week that we really need to start a Marco del Guidice Fan Club!">1</a></sup> points out<sup id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-2-back><a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-2 class=simple-footnote title='Marco del Giudice, "Measuring Sex Differences and Similarities", §2.3.3, "Measurement Error and Other Artifacts"'>2</a></sup> that in the presence of measurement error, standardized effect size measures like <a href="https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> will underestimate the "true" effect size.</p>
<p>The effect size <em>d</em> tries to quantify the difference between two distributions by reporting the difference between the distributions' means in <em>standardized</em> units …</p><p>Marco del Giudice<sup id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-1-back><a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-1 class=simple-footnote title="I was telling friend of the blog Tailcalled the other week that we really need to start a Marco del Guidice Fan Club!">1</a></sup> points out<sup id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-2-back><a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-2 class=simple-footnote title='Marco del Giudice, "Measuring Sex Differences and Similarities", §2.3.3, "Measurement Error and Other Artifacts"'>2</a></sup> that in the presence of measurement error, standardized effect size measures like <a href="https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/">Cohen's <em>d</em></a> will underestimate the "true" effect size.</p>
<p>The effect size <em>d</em> tries to quantify the difference between two distributions by reporting the difference between the distributions' means in <em>standardized</em> units—units that have been scaled to take into account how "spread out" the data is. This gives us a common reference scale for <em>how big</em> a given statistical difference is. Height is measured in meters, and "Agreeableness" in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits">Big Five personality model</a> is an abstract construct that doesn't even have natural units, and yet there's still a meaningful sense in which we can say that the sex difference in height (<em>d</em>≈1.7) is "about three times larger" than the sex difference in Agreeableness (<em>d</em>≈0.5).<sup id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-3-back><a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-3 class=simple-footnote title='Yanna J. Weisberg, Colin G. DeYoung, and Jacob B. Hirsh, "Gender Differences in Personality across the Ten Aspects of the Big Five", Table 2'>3</a></sup></p>
<p>Cohen's <em>d</em> is computed as the difference in group means, divided by the square root of the pooled variance. Thus, holding <em>actual</em> sex differences constant, more measurement error means more variance, which means smaller values of <em>d</em>. Here's some toy Python code illustrating this effect:<sup id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-4-back><a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-4 class=simple-footnote title="Special thanks to Tailcalled for catching a bug in the initially published version of this code.">4</a></sup></p>
<div class=highlight><pre><span></span><span class=kn>from</span> <span class=nn>math</span> <span class=kn>import</span> <span class=n>sqrt</span>
<span class=kn>from</span> <span class=nn>statistics</span> <span class=kn>import</span> <span class=n>mean</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>variance</span>
<span class=kn>from</span> <span class=nn>numpy.random</span> <span class=kn>import</span> <span class=n>normal</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>seed</span>
<span class=c1># seed the random number generator for reproducibility of figures in later</span>
<span class=c1># comments; commment this out to run a new experiment</span>
<span class=n>seed</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=c1># https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number</span>
<span class=k>def</span> <span class=nf>cohens_d</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>X</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>Y</span><span class=p>):</span>
<span class=k>return</span> <span class=p>(</span>
<span class=p>(</span><span class=n>mean</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>X</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=o>-</span> <span class=n>mean</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>Y</span><span class=p>))</span> <span class=o>/</span>
<span class=n>sqrt</span><span class=p>(</span>
<span class=p>(</span><span class=nb>len</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>X</span><span class=p>)</span><span class=o>*</span><span class=n>variance</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>X</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=o>+</span> <span class=nb>len</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>Y</span><span class=p>)</span><span class=o>*</span><span class=n>variance</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>Y</span><span class=p>))</span> <span class=o>/</span>
<span class=p>(</span><span class=nb>len</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>X</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=o>+</span> <span class=nb>len</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>Y</span><span class=p>))</span>
<span class=p>)</span>
<span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>def</span> <span class=nf>population_with_error</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=err>μ</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=err>ε</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>n</span><span class=p>):</span>
<span class=k>def</span> <span class=nf>trait</span><span class=p>():</span>
<span class=k>return</span> <span class=n>normal</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=err>μ</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>def</span> <span class=nf>measurement_error</span><span class=p>():</span>
<span class=k>return</span> <span class=n>normal</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=err>ε</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>return</span> <span class=p>[</span><span class=n>trait</span><span class=p>()</span> <span class=o>+</span> <span class=n>measurement_error</span><span class=p>()</span> <span class=k>for</span> <span class=n>_</span> <span class=ow>in</span> <span class=nb>range</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>n</span><span class=p>)]</span>
<span class=c1># trait differs by 1 standard deviation</span>
<span class=n>true_f</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>population_with_error</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>true_m</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>population_with_error</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=c1># as above, but with 0.5 standard units measurment error</span>
<span class=n>measured_f</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>population_with_error</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mf>0.5</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>measured_m</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>population_with_error</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mf>0.5</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>true_d</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>cohens_d</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>true_f</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>true_m</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>print</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>true_d</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=c1># 1.0069180384313943 — d≈1.0, as expected!</span>
<span class=n>naïve_d</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>cohens_d</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>measured_f</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>measured_m</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>print</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>naïve_d</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=c1># 0.9012430127962895 — deflated!</span>
</pre></div>
<p>But doesn't a similar argument hold for non-error sources of variance that are "orthogonal" to the group difference? Suppose performance on some particular cognitive task can be modeled as the sum of the general intelligence factor (zero or negligible sex difference), and a special ability factor that does show sex differences.<sup id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-5-back><a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-5 class=simple-footnote title='Arthur Jensen, The g Factor, Chapter 13: "Although no evidence was found for sex differences in the mean level of g or in the variability of g, there is clear evidence of marked sex differences in group factors and in test specificity. Males, on average, excel on some factors; females on others. [...] But the best available evidence fails to show a sex difference in g."'>5</a></sup> Then, even with zero measurement error, <em>d</em> would underestimate the difference between women and men <em>of the same general intelligence</em>—</p>
<div class=highlight><pre><span></span><span class=k>def</span> <span class=nf>performance</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=err>μ</span><span class=n>_g</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=err>σ</span><span class=n>_g</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>s</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>n</span><span class=p>):</span>
<span class=k>def</span> <span class=nf>general_ability</span><span class=p>():</span>
<span class=k>return</span> <span class=n>normal</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=err>μ</span><span class=n>_g</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=err>σ</span><span class=n>_g</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>def</span> <span class=nf>special_ability</span><span class=p>():</span>
<span class=k>return</span> <span class=n>normal</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>s</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>return</span> <span class=p>[</span><span class=n>general_ability</span><span class=p>()</span> <span class=o>+</span> <span class=n>special_ability</span><span class=p>()</span> <span class=k>for</span> <span class=n>_</span> <span class=ow>in</span> <span class=nb>range</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>n</span><span class=p>)]</span>
<span class=c1># ♀ one standard deviation better than ♂ at the special factor</span>
<span class=n>population_f</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>performance</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>population_m</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>performance</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=c1># ... but suppose we control/match for general intelligence</span>
<span class=n>matched_f</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>performance</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>1</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>matched_m</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>performance</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>0</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=mi>10000</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=n>population_d</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>cohens_d</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>population_f</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>population_m</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>print</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>population_d</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=c1># 0.7413662423265308 — deflated!</span>
<span class=n>matched_d</span> <span class=o>=</span> <span class=n>cohens_d</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>matched_f</span><span class=p>,</span> <span class=n>matched_m</span><span class=p>)</span>
<span class=k>print</span><span class=p>(</span><span class=n>matched_d</span><span class=p>)</span> <span class=c1># 1.0346898918452228 — as you would expect</span>
</pre></div><hr><p id=notes-header>Notes</p><ol class=simple-footnotes><li id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-1>I was telling friend of the blog <a href="https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/">Tailcalled</a> the other week that we really need to start a Marco del Guidice Fan Club! <a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-1-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-2>Marco del Giudice, <a href="https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/delgiudice_measuring_sex-differences-similarities_pre.pdf">"Measuring Sex Differences and Similarities"</a>, §2.3.3, "Measurement Error and Other Artifacts" <a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-2-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-3>Yanna J. Weisberg, Colin G. DeYoung, and Jacob B. Hirsh, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/">"Gender Differences in Personality across the Ten Aspects of the Big Five"</a>, Table 2 <a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-3-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-4>Special thanks to Tailcalled for <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/source?p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git;a=commitdiff;h=c5158d9a6feaa7ed5c770e6ace83d7e7ba2451e6">catching a bug</a> in the initially published version of this code. <a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-4-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-5>Arthur Jensen, <em>The g Factor</em>, Chapter 13: "Although no evidence was found for sex differences in the mean level of <em>g</em> or in the variability of <em>g</em>, there is clear evidence of marked sex differences in group factors and in test specificity. Males, on average, excel on some factors; females on others. [...] But the best available evidence fails to show a sex difference in <em>g</em>." <a href=#does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-note-5-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li></ol>"A Love That Is Out of Anyone's Control"2019-08-21T05:00:00-07:002019-08-21T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-08-21:/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/<p><em>(Attention conservation notice: Diary-like navel-gazing today. If you're here for the Actual Philosophy, come back the week after next.)</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>ROSE: [...] we can't both exist. I'm going to become half of you. And I need you to know that every moment you love being yourself, that's me, loving you, and loving …</p></blockquote><p><em>(Attention conservation notice: Diary-like navel-gazing today. If you're here for the Actual Philosophy, come back the week after next.)</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>ROSE: [...] we can't both exist. I'm going to become half of you. And I need you to know that every moment you love being yourself, that's me, loving you, and loving <em>being</em> you.</p>
<p>—<em>Steven Universe</em>, "Lion 3: Straight to Video"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I cosplayed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Steven_Universe_characters#Rose_Quartz">Rose Quartz</a> on Saturday at <a href="https://www.fanime.com/">FanimeCon</a> the other month! (Okay, it was May. I'm <a href="/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/">not a very productive writer</a>.) It was fun, I think! I guess?</p>
<p>I'm not really sure what other people get out of fandom conventions. There are panels, but pop-culture analysis is better in <a href="https://stevenuniversallyreviews.tumblr.com/">blog form</a> than live discussion. There are autographs, but there are only so many celebrities I want to pay forty dollars in order to meet for forty seconds. There's the vendor hall, but I don't need more useless material possessions: my life is about bits, not atoms.</p>
<p><a href="/images/rose_quartz_fanime_2019.jpg"><img src="/images/rose_quartz_fanime_2019.jpg" width="240" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>For me, it's my one socially-acceptable excuse for crossdressing in public.</p>
<p>... well, that's not quite right; "socially-acceptable" isn't the concept I want. I live in goddamned <em>"Portland"</em>. (Which is actually Berkeley, but when I started my pseudonymous gender blog, I took my savvy friends' cowardly and paranoid advice to obfuscate even my location, and now I have to keep saying "'Portland'" for backwards compatibility, even though at this point my bad opsec is more akin to a genre convention or a running joke, rather than a real attempt to conceal my identity.) Everyone <em>and her dog</em> has trans friends here. My new young male coworker just staight-up wears a dress and makeup some days, and no one bats an eye. (My attempt to "Blanchpill" him was ... uneventful.)</p>
<p>So if I don't need to fear getting beaten up or even menacing stares, why do I need conventions to dress up? Could part of it be that I'm too old? The fact that I wouldn't be caught dead wearing a dress <em>to work</em> (!!) probably has something to do with my sense of propriety being calibrated to the world of 'aught-six, in contrast to my coworker, who I guess would have come of age in the <em>Obergefell</em>- and Jenner-era world of 'fifteen. For all that this blog is about resisting pro-gender-variance social pressure in the life of the mind, I should at least endeavor to <em>notice</em> when I succumb to anti-gender-variance social pressure in real life.</p>
<p>I think another part of it is an intuition about—how do I put this? Not wanting to commit fraud?—or not wanting to commit <em>obvious</em> fraud. The reason I'm so glad that <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">there's a word for the thing</a> that isn't "crossdresser" or "transvestite" is because it's not about the clothes; it's about wanting to actually have the body of the other sex. The clothes are just a prop. And the prop ... <em>noticeably doesn't work</em>. I don't pass; I have <em>never</em> passed. My voice is wrong; my skeleton is wrong; my movement is wrong; my face continues to be wrong despite makeup. At least at Fanime (where everyone <em>and her dog</em> is in costume) there's no pretense that the pretense is anything more than that. If you fool someone—if only for a moment—then great, but if not, then at least you're not fooling anyone about whether you're fooling yourself.</p>
<p>I'm probably just <em>bad</em> at crossdressing/cosplay? I've never put the kind of <em>effort</em> into, say, a makeup tutorial the way I do for my intellectual endeavors. My Fanime costume was authored by the Amazon product recommendation algorithm: after adding the pink wig to my shopping cart, <a href="/images/discover_related_products.png">the "Discover Related Products" sidebar picked out</a> the hoop skirt and the Mr. Universe tee from Episode 48 <a href="https://steven-universe.fandom.com/wiki/Story_for_Steven">"Story for Steven"</a>. (The sword in the photo illustrating this post is borrowed from another cosplayer cropped out-of-frame.) And unless I become more skilled, I feel like I've hit diminishing returns on conventions—like whatever I was going to get out the experience, I would have gotten either this time or one of the last six (previously: <a href="/images/tilly_cosplay.png">as Ens. Sylvia Tilly at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018</a>, as <em>Equestria Girls</em> Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, <a href="/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/">as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017</a>, <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/">as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017</a>, as <a href="/2016/Dec/joined/">Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the <em>Star Trek</em> 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016</a>, <a href="/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/">as Pearl as San Francisco Comic-Con 2016</a>).</p>
<p><a id="tech-conference"></a>As far as other special events go, I'm flying out to Portland—the real Portland—tonight for a tech conference, and to visit friend of the blog <a href="/author/sophia/">Sophia</a>. You'd think a few days of vacation should do me good—I've been an psychological wreck all year (I mean, even more than my average year) over having accidentally catalyzed a civil war in my local robot cult—except that the same cultural forces that have subtly-yet-fatally corrupted my beautiful robot cult, just <em>own</em> the open-source tech scene outright, which is likely to present a source of additional stress. The spirit of bravery that sings, <a href="https://genius.com/16627280"><em>I will fight for the place where I'm free—for the world I was made in</em></a>, must subsist in a brain wracked by constant emotional pain that—sometimes—is just tired of fighting.</p>The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned Pointlessness of Reason2019-08-11T23:56:00-07:002019-08-11T23:56:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-08-11:/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/<blockquote>
<p>The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." </p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html">"Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush"</a> by Ron Suskind, <em>The New York Times Magazine</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Truth isn't real; there are only competing narratives.</p>
<p>Okay, that probably isn't <em>literally</em> true. There probably really are quarks and leptons and an objective speed of light in a vacuum. But most people don't actually spend much of their lives interacting with reality at a level that requires scientific understanding. Maintaining the wonders of our technological civilization only requires that a few specialists understand some very <em>narrow</em> fragment of the true structure of the world beneath the world—and even they don't have to <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory">take it home with them</a>. For most people all of the time, and all people most of the time, basic folk physics is enough to keep us from dropping too many plates. Everything else we <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief">think we</a> believe is shaped by the narratives we tell each other, whose relationship to testable predictions about the real world is far too complicated for a lone human to empirically check—or even <em>notice</em> how such a check might fail.</p>
<p>And so sufficiently-widely-believed lies <em>bootstrap themselves into being true.</em> You might protest, "But, but, the map is not the territory! Believing doesn't make it so!" But if almost everyone accepts a narrative and <em>sort of</em> behaves as if it were true, then that <em>does</em> (trivially) change the <em>part</em> of reality that consists of people's social behavior—which is the only part that <em>matters</em> outside of someone's dreary specialist duties writing code or mixing chemicals.</p>
<p>If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really <em>is</em> a good financial decision, which is a <em>successful prediction</em> that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence financially rewards the faithful" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't <em>really</em> financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubborn contrarianism that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.</p>
<p>Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been <em>very</em> good at maintaining frame control. I don't know exactly what forms this has taken historically, back when religious authorities held sway. In my secularized world which is at least nominally managed under the auspices of Reason, the preferred tactic is clever <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200529221511/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/">motte-and-bailey</a> language-mindfuckery games, justified by utilitarianism: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naïvely, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never, ever be proven false, because we can <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong">define a word any way we want</a>.</p>
<p>Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you <em>could</em> use language that way, but that makes it <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">more expensive to express</a> <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences</a>—") don't work on utilitarians who <em>explicitly</em> reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200518035012/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/">ought to be better than nothing</a>, but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">perceived need to appease</a> whichever <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster">utility monster</a> has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.</p>
<p>If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and therefore gain status by appealing to reality, and our minds are better at <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info.html">tracking</a> <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/12/forged-by-status.html">status</a> than <a href="https://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/06/doing-good-being-good.html">reality</a>, then eventually dissidents either accept <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/resisting-the-narrative/">the narrative</a> or destroy themselves.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html">Autogynephilic males</a> are better at large-scale coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/patriarchy-is-the-problem/">the patriarchy</a>), so once a political conflict arose between an <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15">intransigent minority</a> of AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to <a href="https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/canwehaveaword-why-talking-about-womens-issues-has-become-a-minefield/">have a goddamned <em>word</em></a> <a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">to describe</a> themselves, it was a <em>fait accompli</em> that the group sampled from the male region in psychological <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace">configuration space</a> would win: male psychology is <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/"><em>designed</em> to win costly intergroup conflicts</a>. And in winning, they <em>create their own reality</em>.</p>
<p>Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict—as far as I know. (I've never <em>seen</em> an estrogen molecule, have you?)</p>
<p>What <em>does</em> vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict are which facts you can <em>talk</em> about—and thus, <a href="https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/it-must-be-said/">in the long run</a>, which facts you can even <em>notice</em>. If you successfully mindfuck everyone into believing that AGPs are really women, then <em>they really are</em>.</p>
<p>Once, in the hateful and bigoted days of our ancestors, people noticed whether babies were female or male, acculturated them into different social roles (childbearing and war being more relevant to their cultural systems then that of today's <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have-all-the-children-gone/594133/">barren</a>, <a href="https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876">pacified</a> elites), and had <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes">short, simple words</a> for the resulting clusters in personspace: girls and boys, women and men.</p>
<p>But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve <em>their</em> reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex <em>roles</em>—from <em>within</em> a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, second-wave feminism's push to make Society <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190327152639/https://ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861">more congenial to masculine-of-center women</a> provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender distinction.</p>
<p><a id="blue-egregore"></a>That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in <em>Obergefell v. Hodges</em>, the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/">Blue</a> <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/">Egregore's</a> LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369">furtive, closeted crossdressers</a>), and the ~5% (?) of <a href="https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/">girls</a> on the losing end of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition">female intrasexual competition</a> (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic).</p>
<p><a id="re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction"></a>Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/">bishop</a>) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the <em>other</em> direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender <em>roles</em> f.k.a. <em>sex</em> roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/">Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)</a>, medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a>a successful <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">sex change</a>) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of <a href="http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/">lying</a> about one's sex).</p>
<p>In contrast, post-<em>Obergefell</em> gender theory belongs to simulacrum level 3: rather than having a non-circular truth condition, "gender" is just a free-floating Schelling point, a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web">role</a> or <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender">costume</a> to be <a href="https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/">symbolically identified</a> with, meaning no more (and no less) what one can predict that others will predict that others will predict ... <em>&c.</em> that it means. Biological sex would continue to be a decision-relevant variable if it were cognitively available (summarizing a variety of physical differences, who can get pregnant, various game-theoretic social consequences of who can get pregnant, <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265">personality differences to the tune of</a> <a href="https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/delgiudice_2013_is-d_valid_ep.pdf">Mahanalobis <em>D</em></a> ≈ 2.7, <em>&c.</em>)—but <em>no</em> culture can provide all the concepts that <em>would be</em> decision-relevant <em>if available</em>. Definitionally, you don't know what you're missing. <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein">"The limits of my language are the limits of my world."</a> Some claim to have <a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html"><em>seen through</em></a> to a world beneath the world, but without a way to <em>share</em> what they've allegedly seen, to bring it within mutually-reinforcing consensus of the intersubjective, who's not to say that they only dreamed it?</p>
<p><a id="a-dream-about-the-use-of-maps"></a>I have a recurring dream, a naïve dream that can't exist. It's a dream about the use of maps. In my dream, even people who—for example—<a href="/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/">dislike psychological sex differences</a>, have an interest in sex differences research being as accurate as possible, using the most precise concepts possible, because only a true understanding of the interplay between nature and nurture can be <em>used to design</em> a more just Society that minimizes inequality, just as only a true map of the territory can help you plot your way across a dangerous terrain. And that is how it would work for a <a href="https://nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html">singleton</a> God-Empress that could arrange human lives like pieces on a chess board, or the words in a novel.</p>
<p>But humans don't use maps to navigate the territory. Humans <em>live in the map</em>. <em>Researching</em> sex differences can only make them more salient in your culture. <em>Researching</em> how to turn men into women could only draw attention to all the dimensions along which we don't know how to do the job. If you don't like what you see, then <em>remove your eyes</em>. I dream of things being otherwise—if only people <em>knew</em> about the forces constructing their experience, if only they <em>knew</em> about the empires competing to comprise them, maybe we could negotiate our way to the good outcome (whatever that turns out to be) <em>without</em> the mindfucking?</p>
<p>But that's not how things sort out. So I, lacking both the power to act and the humility to unsee, am left to just study it. Judiciously. As I do.</p>The Source of Our Power2019-07-02T05:00:00-07:002019-07-02T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-07-02:/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/<p>"I really don't think you're rationally considering how to maximize your contribution to rationality pedagogy and deciding it runs through freaking out about transgender and maybe abandoning the movement in disgust."</p>
<p>"<em>Almost no one's</em> optimal contribution to rationality pedagogy runs through freaking out about transgender; I just think it's plausible …</p><p>"I really don't think you're rationally considering how to maximize your contribution to rationality pedagogy and deciding it runs through freaking out about transgender and maybe abandoning the movement in disgust."</p>
<p>"<em>Almost no one's</em> optimal contribution to rationality pedagogy runs through freaking out about transgender; I just think it's plausible that <em>mine</em> does. It is written that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect">power comes from having Something to Protect</a>: the <a href="https://www.readthesequences.com/">Sequences</a> were distilled out of Eliezer Yudkowsky's attempt to think carefully about how to build a superintelligence; the classic <em>Slate Star Codex</em> posts on <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200110071406/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/">argumentative charity</a> were born out of Scott Alexander's <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200612024112/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/">trauma after accidentally running afoul</a> of social-justice activists.</p>
<p>"If Eliezer had <em>started out</em> trying to write about human rationality, if Scott had <em>started out</em> trying to write about discourse norms, <em>it wouldn't have worked</em>. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion."</p>Hiatus2019-05-01T22:10:00-07:002019-05-01T22:10:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-05-01:/2019/May/hiatus/<p><em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> is going on hiatus until 1 July while the author recovers from a broken heart and a shattered faith in humanity; there will be no new posts in May and June. But don't touch that <a href="/feeds/all.atom.xml">subscription</a>—we'll be back in two months with more …</p><p><em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> is going on hiatus until 1 July while the author recovers from a broken heart and a shattered faith in humanity; there will be no new posts in May and June. But don't touch that <a href="/feeds/all.atom.xml">subscription</a>—we'll be back in two months with more of your favorite social commentary, philosophical disquisitions, and gooey self-disclosure! In the meantime, maybe read a paper book?
<br/><br/><br/></p>Link: "Where to Draw the Boundaries?"2019-04-13T16:32:00-07:002019-04-13T16:32:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-04-13:/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/<p>It doesn't have anything to do with the topic focuses of this blog, but <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">this new post on <em>Less Wrong</em> about the mathematical laws governing how to talk about dolphins</a> is just <em>so good</em> that I have to share it with my readers! I hope to read more from that …</p><p>It doesn't have anything to do with the topic focuses of this blog, but <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries">this new post on <em>Less Wrong</em> about the mathematical laws governing how to talk about dolphins</a> is just <em>so good</em> that I have to share it with my readers! I hope to read more from that author in the future!—it would be <em>really unfortunate</em> if his writing productivity and mine turned out to be negatively correlated for some inexplicable reason.
<br/><br/><br/></p>Interlude XVIII2019-02-11T05:00:00-08:002019-02-11T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-02-11:/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/<p>"You <em>don't understand</em>. Sure, you might make a few interesting abstract points here and there, but this isn't some masturbatory ivory-tower intellectual <em>game</em> to us. We're fighting for our <em>existence</em> here."</p>
<p>"Yes, you are. <em>And so am I</em>. I need simple language that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">carves reality at the joints</a> in order …</p><p>"You <em>don't understand</em>. Sure, you might make a few interesting abstract points here and there, but this isn't some masturbatory ivory-tower intellectual <em>game</em> to us. We're fighting for our <em>existence</em> here."</p>
<p>"Yes, you are. <em>And so am I</em>. I need simple language that <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary">carves reality at the joints</a> in order to achieve the map that reflects the territory. If I had the choice, I'd prefer not to be complicit with the forces that oppress you—if only you weren't complicit with the forces that oppose me."</p>Interlude XVII2019-02-04T05:00:00-08:002019-02-04T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-02-04:/2019/Feb/interlude-xvii/<p>"Not <em>all</em> men are like that!"</p>
<p>"I suppose you buy lottery tickets, too."
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Use It or Lose It2019-01-27T23:00:00-08:002019-01-27T23:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-01-27:/2019/Jan/use-it-or-lose-it/<p>It's <a href="https://archive.fo/eNcoQ">been remarked upon</a> that popular positions are often supported with weak arguments, because people aren't in the habit of having to defend them. I think there's a distinct but related time-dependent effect on advocates of sufficiently unpopular positions. At first, the advocate of the unpopular position grows more sophisticated …</p><p>It's <a href="https://archive.fo/eNcoQ">been remarked upon</a> that popular positions are often supported with weak arguments, because people aren't in the habit of having to defend them. I think there's a distinct but related time-dependent effect on advocates of sufficiently unpopular positions. At first, the advocate of the unpopular position grows more sophisticated over time as they refine and elaborate their case against the orthodoxy—until they eventually notice that arguing doesn't work, at which point their argument quality undergoes a sharp and sudden decline: if there's literally no way you can win (because advocates of the orthodoxy are just going to confabulate a series of ever more ridiculous bullshit objections to waste your time), why bother putting in all that effort?</p>
<p>If "Because while you can <em>select</em> a sample from a different multivariate distribution to match a sample from another distribution along one or a few given dimensions, the samples are going to differ in the variables that you didn't select" is just going to be ignored <em>anyway</em>, the temptation to flip a table and just say "Because <em>fuck you</em>, that's why" may become nigh overwhelming.</p>Interlude XVI2019-01-26T17:00:00-08:002019-01-26T17:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-01-26:/2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/<p>"But like, maybe a <em>better</em> strategy than <em>pretending not to notice</em> that women are a different thing that I don't understand, might be to try to listen to them, and learn from them, and appropriate the good parts of what they have without literally insisting that we're instances of the …</p><p>"But like, maybe a <em>better</em> strategy than <em>pretending not to notice</em> that women are a different thing that I don't understand, might be to try to listen to them, and learn from them, and appropriate the good parts of what they have without literally insisting that we're instances of the same thing, which is, unfortunately, not true. Or even—why am I even saying 'unfortunately'? It was already not true <em>before</em> I picked up my teenage religion."</p>
<p>"I don't see what's morally threatening about women being a different thing, because/as-long-as woman-cluster-humans still have the same amount of personhood as man-cluster-humans. If that <em>weren't</em> true then that would be morally threatening, but that's not something you've brought up so far."</p>
<p>"It's not morally threatening <em>to you!</em>"</p>The Dialectic2019-01-19T14:50:00-08:002019-01-19T14:50:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2019-01-19:/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/<p>Growing up as a younger child in an atomized, low-fertility <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/10/western-educated-industrialized-rich-and-democratic/181667/">WEIRD</a> world, I was until recently in the historically anomalous position of not really having any idea what children are actually like. (I have some memories of childhood, of course, but that's not the same as field observations with an …</p><p>Growing up as a younger child in an atomized, low-fertility <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/10/western-educated-industrialized-rich-and-democratic/181667/">WEIRD</a> world, I was until recently in the historically anomalous position of not really having any idea what children are actually like. (I have some memories of childhood, of course, but that's not the same as field observations with an adult intellect—everything from before age 14 or so feels insufficiently continuous with my current self to really constitute knowledge in my possession.)</p>
<p>It's not clear to what extent people really have <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">anticipation-controlling</a> beliefs in the absence of lived-experience data, but the narratives we <em>think</em> we believe come from what we read.</p>
<p>One such narrative relevant to the topic-focus of this blog is the progressive mainstay, "Psychological sex differences are fake/socially-constructed." A <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism">metacontrarian</a> counternarrative that I got a lot of exposure to as I sought out ideologically-inconvenient science during my twenties was, "Overeducated out-of-touch liberals <em>think</em> that psychological sex differences are fake/socially-constructed, until they finally have children of their own and see for themselves how much is innate." As I slowly came to grips with just how deeply the progressive coalition has been <em><a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/">systematically lying to me</a> about everything I <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">want</a> and <a href="/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/">value</a></em>, I grew to mostly accept the counternarrative.</p>
<p>And so as I've recently gotten some field data thanks to some of my friends actually having children (!!) in the past few years, it has been a <em>pleasant surprise</em> to notice the metacontrarian counternarrative making <em>failed</em> predictions in the form of my friends' kids' individual personalities not being overtly stereotypical: friend's daughter's (age 3) fantasy doll play frequently revolves around epic battles of good guys <em>vs</em>. bad guys (with the bad guys regularly being killed or put in jail); other friend's son (age 2) is the subject of adorable anecdotes about wanting to hug and not hurt people, and his current special interest is endlessly rewatching the documentary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babies_(film)"><em>Babies</em></a>. The glorious <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891">Hydeian</a> counter-counternarrative is confirmed: maybe some sex differences are real, but the effect sizes are so small that you really should just treat everyone as individuals, <em>not</em> out of ideological commitments, but because it actually makes sense!! Rah! ⚥ 💖</p>
<p>On the other hand, if I'm remembering my <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Two-Sexes-Growing-Coming-Together/dp/0674914821">Maccoby</a> (<a href="https://archive.is/MbUUN">RIP</a> 😢) correctly, a lot of the standard social-play differences emerge a little bit <em>after</em> toddlerhood. So I'm bracing myself for the possibility of a dreary counter-counter-counternarrative in a few years.</p>Untitled Metablogging, 26 December 20182018-12-26T23:45:00-08:002018-12-26T23:45:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-12-26:/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/<p><em>(Attention conservation notice: <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreWriters">metablogging</a> is boring. This post previews some planned and in-development content and expounds on the author's psychological state. It is only being published for psychological reasons. <a href="/feeds/all.atom.xml">Please subscribe</a> for finished, high-quality content later!)</em></p>
<p>Um, merry belated Christmas to readers of <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>?</p>
<p>I …</p><p><em>(Attention conservation notice: <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreWriters">metablogging</a> is boring. This post previews some planned and in-development content and expounds on the author's psychological state. It is only being published for psychological reasons. <a href="/feeds/all.atom.xml">Please subscribe</a> for finished, high-quality content later!)</em></p>
<p>Um, merry belated Christmas to readers of <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em>?</p>
<p>I guess I haven't made any new posts here in almost two months?—which is not great. It would make sense for a blog to not update in two months if the author really just didn't have anything to say worth reading during that time. But I still have <em>lots</em> of things I want to say here, that I've wanted to say for a long time, even, that I just <em>somehow</em> haven't gotten around to writing up ... even though the blog is more than two years old, <em>and</em> I didn't even have a dayjob for twelve months of that. "Writer's block" doesn't even begin to cover this; it is <a href="/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/"><em>criminal</em></a>. Here's just a <em>partial</em> list of some of the post ideas that I haven't gotten around to finishing for you yet—</p>
<p><a id="post-ideas-list"></a></p>
<ul>
<li><a id="reply-to-ozy"></a>I still need to finish drafting my reply to <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/">Ozy's reply</a> to <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">my reply</a> to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">the immortal Scott Alexander</a><ul>
<li>I've got ~4800 words drafted, but it needs a <em>lot</em> more work in order to make it a maximally clear and maximally defensible blog post</li>
<li>A <em>brief</em> (only ~350 words) summary—<ul>
<li>I hopefully-accurately summarize Ozy as trying to make a <em>reductio ad absurdum</em> argument, claiming that my arguments relying on the relevance of psychological sex differences would imply that lesbians aren't women, which is absurd.<ul>
<li>I argue that this is a misunderstanding of my position: I don't want to <em>define</em> "gender" based on psychology. Rather, I want language to talk about the natural category of <em>biological sex</em>, which makes predictions about <em>many</em> possible observations, a few of which predictions are effectively binary (like reproductive systems and chromosomes), but many of which are merely statistical. The existence of women (in the sense of people with uteruses and XX chromosomes, <em>&c</em>.) who are more masculine than the modal woman among many psychological dimensions, does not refute the claim that gender-dysphoric men can't simply be <em>defined</em> as women without consequences.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>I hopefully-accurately summarize Ozy as arguing that many sex-based social distinctions should actually be made on the basis of more specific traits, not sex: for example, if you're worried about harassment, you should try to filter against harassers, not men.<ul>
<li>I argue that this isn't always practical given the <em>far</em>-less-than-perfect information available in many social situations. Since not all traits can be cheaply, precisely, and verifiably measured, sometimes people might want to use (perceived) sex as a proxy, or as a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes">Schelling point</a> for coordination.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>I hopefully-accurately summarize Ozy as arguing that gender, like money, is socially constructed by collective agreement. It's coherent to argue that gender should be fully consensual, attributed on the basis of self-identity.<ul>
<li>I argue that just as not all possible money systems are feasible (in particular, you couldn't run an economy in which anyone could arbitrarily declare what they thought other people should categorize as a <em>dollar</em>), not all possible gender systems are feasible. Fully consensual gender <em>sounds</em> like a good idea when you phrase it like that (what kind of monster could possibly be against "consent"??), but doesn't reflect the structure of probabilistic inferences people actually make in the real world when they have some information about people's sex.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a id="high-dimensional-social-science-and-the-conjunction-of-small-effect-sizes"></a>I need to write an in-depth post about the overlap-along-one-dimension-does-not-imply-overlap-in-the-entire-configuration-space statistical phenomenon (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pattern_classification_medium.JPG">standard diagram</a>) of which I have decided that <a href="https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/1071245692180578305">"univariate fallacy"</a> is a better name than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin's_Fallacy) (working title:" title="High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes">"Lewontin's fallacy"</a></li>
<li>a technical post about how imperfect measurements are subject to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean">regression to the mean</a>, which (unfortunately! <em>really genuinely</em> unfortunately!) quantitatively weakens the standard reassurance of, "Oh, no one should feel threatened by discussion of group differences, because the statistics obviously don't apply to any one individual"<ul>
<li>I haven't done any serious math in a while and I'm afraid that learning and explaining the details here could take me <em>many</em> hours</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>a technical post about using <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/o8/conditional_independence_and_naive_bayes/">naïve Bayes models</a> for sex categorization<ul>
<li><a id="daphne-koller-and-the-methods"></a>I never got very far into <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/probabilistic-graphical-models"><em>Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality</em></a> (I know; I like my title better), but I'd like to dig into it again if I can somehow find the time</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>a post about how I'm nervous about Codes of Conduct in the open-source world being used as an ideological-conformity enforcement mechanism, in contrast to their laudable ostensible purpose of preventing harrassment, <em>&c.</em> (working title: "Codes of Convergence; Or, <a href="https://genius.com/7888863">Smile More</a>")</li>
<li>a critical appraisal of the social phenomenon of self-declared non-binary gender identities (working title: "'But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means': Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology")</li>
<li>a post about the mechanisms of social change and how there might be a role for a <em>very narrowly-targeted</em> form of political activism where you try to give people more accurate factual information, rather than lobbying for any particular concrete policy (working title: "An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History Yelling, 'Wait! I Like the Idea, but the Execution Needs Work!'")</li>
<li>a post about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neglect_of_probability">neglect of probability</a> (working title: "The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition")</li>
<li>an in-depth post about my views on what's going on with late-onset MtF (working title: "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer")<ul>
<li>heretofore I've mostly just been referring people to go read Anne Lawrence (<a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html">short version</a>, <a href="https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf">long version</a>) or <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/">Kay Brown</a> because it's more efficient to just link to a lit review that's already been done rather than write something new</li>
<li>I actually do have a lot of residual uncertainty that I probably haven't made sufficiently clear in my existing writing! It seems <em>absolutely nailed down</em> that the HSTS/early-onset/feminine/androphilic thing is different from my thing, but there's still some room for <em>other</em> major psychological causal factors influencing transition besides AGP in many people</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>a possibly-lightly-fictionalized account of what my autogynephilic fantasy life looks like <em>in detail</em><ul>
<li>I'd <em>kind of rather not</em> write in too much detail about such private and distasteful matters on a blog that also has a lot of <em>non</em>-pornographic content that I'm really proud of, but I'm afraid it actually <em>is</em> important for the intellectual project I'm trying to accomplish here. Without the details, it's too easy for someone to say, "Oh, 'autogynephilia'; that's just some bigoted, unfalsifiable theory someone made up because they hate trans women", and I think the details really make it clear why I <em>need</em> this word (or an exact synonym) to describe an important part of <em>my life</em>—and I <em>suspect</em> the lives of a lot of other people, including a lot of people who go on to transition, although that's harder to prove</li>
<li>This is the kind of thing that makes me glad I'm still using a pseudonym, even though I feel guilty about the cowardice<ul>
<li>I mean, it's not a particularly carefully guarded pseudonym in either direction—not at all hard to doxx by someone who actually cares—but since you almost certainly <em>don't</em> care, it does offer a certain amount of "differential visibility", which is <em>probably</em> the smart move to avoid distractions from my real-name life and work</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>book review of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_(Binnie_novel)"><em>Nevada</em></a></li>
<li>product review of <a href="https://faceapp.com/">FaceApp</a> (the <em>uniquely best piece of software in the world</em>)</li>
<li>product review of the Oculus Go (as a viewing device for, um, certain VR videos)</li>
<li>a <a href="/tag/deniably-allegorical/">deniably-allegorical</a> short <a href="/tag/epistemic-horror/">epistemic horror</a> story about the evolution of squirrels who are friends (working title: "Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels"—um, trust me)</li>
<li>a short love/epistemic-horror story built around a surprisingly-not-that-contrived interpretation of the <a href="https://genius.com/Rebecca-sugar-love-like-you-end-credits-lyrics"><em>Steven Universe</em> ending theme</a> as being about autogynephilia (working title: "'Love Like You'"—um, trust me again)</li>
<li>a short epistemic horror story (with a magical-realism twist at the end) about a young <a href="http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/TERF">gender-critical feminist</a> (who is <em>surprisingly</em> knowledgable about evolutionary psychology) who gets wrongfully involuntarily committed after losing a night of sleep and is assigned an MtF roommate in the psych ward</li>
<li>and more</li>
</ul>
<p>... and just, I don't know. I've been <em>pretty upset</em> lately in the way that I've been on-and-off <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/">upset</a> for the last two and a half years, where in addition to this <em>creepy</em> and <em>absurd</em> pseudonymous blog that I don't even have the willpower to write at a decent pace (see the above list of things-yet-left-unwritten), I keep getting into arguments with people in real life (or in <a href="https://discordapp.com/">Discord</a> servers that feel real-life-adjacent) who seem to think that guys like me can <em>literally</em> be women <em>by means of saying so</em>.</p>
<p>And it's just <em>not true</em>. It's just <em>so obviously not true</em>. <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">(Given current technology.)</a></p>
<p>So, I'm an intellectual. I <em>realize</em> very well that "It's obviously not true" isn't an argument that someone could engage with. So I do make arguments. I try very hard to be careful to explain the empirical claims I'm making and point to evidence, and try to anticipate and disclaim in advance the most probable misinterpretations of what I'm saying, and demonstrate that I understand that words can be used in many ways depending on context, but that I'm trying to use language to point to a particular empirical statistical structure in the world, and that becomes a lot more cumbersome to express if I'm not allowed to use this word with this widely-used definition/<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions">extension</a> ...</p>
<p>I'm not perfect. Especially in real-time discussions (text or meatspace), I can often look back and point to things that I said that were wrong, and know that I have sinned: "Oh, that wasn't quite fair of me; oh, that was kind of <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200618055932/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/">bravery-debatey</a> of me; oh, I should have more carefully distinguished between those claims."</p>
<p>I'm not perfect, but I think I'm <em>pretty good</em>. Even if I don't agree with someone about the facts—even if I don't agree with someone about what <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided">policy trade-offs</a> to make, including policy trade-offs about how to use language—surely, <em>surely</em> we can at least agree on my meta-level point about <em>cognitive</em> costs being part of the policy trade-off about how to use language?</p>
<p>And somehow it <em>doesn't land</em>. It's like talking to a tape recorder that just endlessly repeats, "Ha-ha! <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/">I can define a word any way I want</a>! You can't use that concept unless you can provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases!"</p>
<p><a id="photo-of-danielle-muscato"></a>Although I do have a couple favorite edge cases of my own. I generally prefer not to involve named individuals in arguments, even public figures: it's unclassy. But having nothing left, I pull out a <a href="http://daniellemuscato.startlogic.com/uploads/3/4/9/3/34938114/2249042_orig.jpg">photograph of Danielle Muscato</a>. "Look," I say. "This is a photograph of a man. You can see it, too, right? Right?"</p>
<p>And they say, "It's possible to be mistaken about cis people's genders, too."</p>
<p>"Yes, I agree with that," I say. "But can you see how I want to treat 'mistaken identification with respect to a truth condition based on the conjunction of genitalia, chromosomes, and hormone levels' as noticeably different-in-kind from 'mistaken identification with respect to the truth condition of because-I-said-so'?"</p>
<p>They don't see it.</p>
<p>And then I <em>really</em> have nothing left.</p>
<p>I want to flip a table and scream, <em>"Stop gaslighting me, you sanctimonious lying bastards!"</em></p>
<p>But that's not an argument, either. (It would also constitute toxic masculinity.)</p>
<p>I don't know. I'm just venting here because I've been <em>very upset</em>. My venting is certainly not written in the most defensible possible way. (I can at least think of a few things that I've addressed in previous posts that I haven't addressed here, that someone reading only this post could accuse me of neglecting.)</p>
<p>Maybe with more time and more effort I could find <em>exactly</em> the right words to cover every possible caveat and nitpick and <em>finally</em> be able to communicate the thing—</p>
<p>But maybe I just need to relax. Not take it so seriously. Forget about the topic for a few days or a few months. Wash the goddamned dishes, write some goddamned code. <em>Maybe</em> it's not <a href="/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/">the end of the world</a> if someone is Wrong on the Internet.</p>Interlude XV2018-10-29T05:00:00-07:002018-10-29T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-10-29:/2018/Oct/interlude-xv/<p>"Can you believe people are calling my blog transphobic?! <em>Me!</em> That's like calling Christina Hoff Sommers an anti-feminist!"</p>
<p>"Um ... you know, that's <em>actually</em> a pretty good analogy. People like Sommers who <em>agree</em> with a one-sentence literal summary of feminism's goals, like 'women and men should have equal rights', but <em>disagree …</em></p><p>"Can you believe people are calling my blog transphobic?! <em>Me!</em> That's like calling Christina Hoff Sommers an anti-feminist!"</p>
<p>"Um ... you know, that's <em>actually</em> a pretty good analogy. People like Sommers who <em>agree</em> with a one-sentence literal summary of feminism's goals, like 'women and men should have equal rights', but <em>disagree</em> with seemingly every <em>other</em> belief and instrumental strategy connotationally associated with feminism, and who spend a disproportionate amount of time criticizing central examples of feminists, might reasonably be perceived as anti-feminist, even if they're not literally trying to repeal the 19th Amendment. It's possible to meet the category membership criteria of some simple candidate verbal definition, while not actually being part of that cluster in configuration space along most of the dimensions that people care about and want to use the word to refer to."</p>
<p>"Huh. That argument sounds ... familiar."</p>
<p>"Does it."</p>
<p>"Right, so, I'm pro-trans in the same sense that autogynephilic trans women are women."</p>
<p>"<em>No!</em> I mean, <em>not helping your case!</em>"</p>Laser 92018-10-26T05:00:00-07:002018-10-26T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-10-26:/2018/Oct/laser-9/<p><a href="/images/laser_9.jpg"><img src="/images/laser_9.jpg" width="180" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>I had my ninth laser session the other week (out of the ten-session package that I prepaid for), almost a year after <a href="/2017/Nov/laser-1/">my first</a>. (They schedule them out four to six weeks, and I rescheduled a couple of them.) I'm ... pretty underwhelmed by the results so far? My facial hair …</p><p><a href="/images/laser_9.jpg"><img src="/images/laser_9.jpg" width="180" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>I had my ninth laser session the other week (out of the ten-session package that I prepaid for), almost a year after <a href="/2017/Nov/laser-1/">my first</a>. (They schedule them out four to six weeks, and I rescheduled a couple of them.) I'm ... pretty underwhelmed by the results so far? My facial hair is nontrivially <em>thinner</em> than it was before (and maybe slightly blonder <a href="https://www.urbana.ie/blog/can-laser-hair-removal-work-light-hair/">by attrition</a>)—it's hard to be sure of the magnitude because apparently I'm still the kind of <em>idiot</em> who doesn't bother to take detailed "Before" photos <em>even after <a href="/2017/Nov/laser-1/#anchor-before">explicitly noting this</a></em>—but there's still a lot of it noticeably <em>there</em>. "Marking my face as male", I want to put it, but maybe that would be a misleading phrasing, because it's not as if people don't reliably, involuntarily infer my sex from my facial structure even at my cleanest-shaven. (And I should remember that things are only going to get worse—despite my beautiful–beautiful ponytail in the back, Trent says my hairline in the front is already a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%E2%80%93Norwood_scale">Norwood 3</a>, and it takes all of my strength as an aspiring rationalist just to believe him.)</p>
<p>I'm not sure how typical my results are and why—the <a href="https://www.laseraway.com/articles/hair-removal/effective-laser-hair-removal-really/">marketing literature</a> from the clinic/parlor/salon promises permanent reduction by "up to 90 percent after 6–8 treatments", but <em>up to</em> isn't exactly a probability distribution. Maybe I just have resilient hair; maybe I'm grimacing or grunting too much during the treatment, priming the merciful nurse–technician to hold back on the zapping more than she (invariably <em>she</em>) is supposed to; who knows?</p>Interlude XIV2018-10-24T05:00:00-07:002018-10-24T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-10-24:/2018/Oct/interlude-xiv/<p>"But surely a man such as yourself—"</p>
<p>"I'm <em>nonbinary</em>," interjected the other, holding up a name badge bearing a <em>they/them/theirs</em> sticker.</p>
<p>"Right, sorry," said Mark. "Surely a nonbinary man such as yourself—"
<br/><br/><br/></p>Sticker Prices2018-10-22T05:00:00-07:002018-10-22T05:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-10-22:/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/<p><em>(An anecdote of no consequence)</em></p>
<p>This year at a conference for this open-source scene I've been really into lately, there were pronoun stickers in everyone's conference swag bags ("[...] so we can all help each other get things right. Wear them in solidarity with others too. Help us make [the conference …</p><p><em>(An anecdote of no consequence)</em></p>
<p>This year at a conference for this open-source scene I've been really into lately, there were pronoun stickers in everyone's conference swag bags ("[...] so we can all help each other get things right. Wear them in solidarity with others too. Help us make [the conference] welcoming and inclusive for all"), including <em>they/them/theirs</em>, <em>ze/zir/zirs</em> (!), and blanks (!!). Leaving aside <a href="/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#anchor-pronoun-sticker-discourse">impersonal philosophical objections</a> for a moment, I want you to consider <a href="https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/172800552516/so-i-havent-posted-about-this-since-college">the mild stress this kind of thing can inflict</a> on people who have <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/05/using-gender-neutral-pronouns-could-actually-misgender-people.html"><em>some</em> form</a> of gender-related problems but who have <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">chosen</a> some form of <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">mitigation</a> other than transitioning.</p>
<p><a href="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg"><img src="/images/blerp-d9aa89fd_pronoun_stickers.jpg" width="300" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>Which sticker am <em>I</em> supposed to put on if I am to show solidarity? The <em>he/him/his</em> sticker would be the obvious, straightforward choice. After all, that is, in fact, the third-person pronoun people use for me. But in a context where I'm being offered a <em>choice</em>, I <em>don't want</em> to choose the male option, because that makes it look like I "identify" with my maleness—as if I were <em>cis</em> in the strong sense of having a "gender identity" matching my "assigned" sex, rather than in the <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/">weaker sense</a> of being a reactionary coward whose pathological need for a backwards-compatible social identity is preventing her from becoming her best self.</p>
<p>At the same time, I can't wear the <em>she/her/hers</em> sticker. And I think there's a sense in which <em>can't</em> really is a better choice of words than <em>don't want to</em>. It's not that I don't enjoy being refered to as <em>she</em> in a context where that makes sense, like when I'm <a href="/tag/cosplay/">crossplaying at a fandom convention</a>, or in the Secret Blanchardian Conspiracy Chatroom, or in the ironic last sentence of the preceding paragraph. It's that, in real life, when I'm not playing dress-up and I can't hide my face behind the fog of net, <em>people are going to notice</em> that I'm male and habitually use the English language pronoun for males on such occasions that they need to refer to me in the third person. I <em>could</em> attach a sticker to my badge instructing them otherwise, but only in the same sense that I could tell them that black is white and cats are dogs—that is, probably not with a straight face.</p>
<p>But none of this really matters: if you don't want to wear a sticker, you can just not wear one, with no discernible social consequences. (At least, not this year!)</p>
<p>I did get asked for my pronouns once, the first day, by someone who I think was not yet aware of the stickers—the only time I've been asked for pronouns when I wasn't at an explicitly social-justice-oriented event (like at the local <a href="/2017/Jan/title-sequence/">genderqueer support group</a>, or "Introduction to Feminisms" class at the University in Santa Cruz eleven years ago) or literally wearing a dress (in the cosplay repair lounge at Comic-Con).</p>
<p>I had sat at this person's table to listen to them eloquently denounce at length the many ways in which some code they encountered was horribly overcomplicated—which made sense, they explained, because the 40-year-old men who wrote those libraries were all <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity">Trump supporters and Nazis and libertarians</a>.</p>
<p>("Oh, that's interesting!", I said, "Do you suppose there's that large of a correlation between political ideology and code quality? With a sufficiently smart linter to operationalize quality, this could be amenable to empirical study ...")</p>
<p>The question came as we introduced ourselves mid-conversation. After I gave my name (as "Mark"), the person said, "What are your pronouns?"</p>
<p>I think I handled it reasonably well?—hemming and stalling for a few seconds before eventually giving <em>he</em>, with a disclaimer that the reason I hesitated was because I don't want to imply that I <em>identify</em> with masculinity—it's complicated. The questioner, sensing my discomfort, made an effort to placate or reassure me: "Sure," the person said, nodding, "That's just what you're using right now; that's cool."</p>
<p>The question was a compliment, really. I don't think they would have asked if I had had a beard. There's <em>no chance</em> of anyone mistaking me for a woman—but maybe the conjunction of my beautiful–beautiful ponytail and my manner and my <a href="/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/">slight gynecomastia</a> is enough for me to be mistaken for the kind of man (<a href="/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/">in the sense of</a> adult human male) who thinks he can demand that other people perceive him as a woman or nonbinary person. (I think I'm at least as credibly androgynous as a couple of the guys I saw wearing the <em>they/them/theirs</em> stickers.)</p>
<p>How strange it is—to be <em>seen</em> and <em>unseen</em> at the same time. Seen, because nice smart progressive people know to look for cues of gender variance and accord that with deference and latitude, such that I parse (correctly!) as someone who plausibly has some kind of gender problems, rather than "man who happens to have long hair for whatever stupid but uninteresting reason."</p>
<p>And unseen, because nice smart progressive people don't bother allocating much prior probability to the hypothesis that people who look and talk like them might think that sometimes the Trump supporters and Nazis and libertarians <a href="/2017/Mar/smart/">have a goddamned point</a>.</p>The Information Theory of Passing2018-10-01T20:35:00-07:002018-10-01T20:35:00-07:00Sophiatag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-10-01:/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/<p><em>(This is a guest post by friend of the blog Sophia!)</em></p>
<p>I tend to think of passing in terms of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)">bits</a>. If a stranger glances briefly at me as I walk by them on the sidewalk, how many bits of evidence do I expect they obtain for the proposition that …</p><p><em>(This is a guest post by friend of the blog Sophia!)</em></p>
<p>I tend to think of passing in terms of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)">bits</a>. If a stranger glances briefly at me as I walk by them on the sidewalk, how many bits of evidence do I expect they obtain for the proposition that I'm a trans woman (or autogynephilic man who's chosen to socially transition—not trying to care about terminology here, and you can do the translation yourself) against the hypothesis that I'm a cis woman? In other words, by how much did log<sub>2</sub>(P(trans)/P(cis)) increase? (There's a bit of a simplification here because I'm ignoring the rest of the hypothesis space, but if someone has visible breasts and is wearing women's clothing, I'd say it's safe to ignore.)</p>
<p>Of course, the number of bits they get depends on how familiar they are with differences between (AGP) trans women and cis women, and how long they watch me or talk to me. And whether they clock me as trans also depends on their base rate. The correct base rate (prevalence of AGP transsexualism in men) is a political football and I haven't sorted through the studies, but let's call it 0.1% in Portland. Then someone who's well-calibrated will believe me to be more likely trans than not if they get about ten bits of evidence to that effect (because log<sub>2</sub>(0.1%/99.9%) ≈ 10).</p>
<p>Different pieces of evidence are evident in different interactions, but I put myself at about (assuming a solid minute of study and focusing on the question, and making up numbers terribly):</p>
<p><strong>face structure</strong>: 2 bits<br>
<strong>voice</strong>: 0.5 bits (I'm very proud of this, yes, it's a bitch to train)<br>
<strong>height</strong>: 0 bits (at 5′7″)<br>
<strong>hair</strong>: 0.5 bits<br>
<strong>clothing</strong>: 2 bits (I dress more 20-something than 30-something, which is telling)<br>
<strong>posture</strong>: 0.5 bits (probably the low-hanging fruit right now)<br>
<strong>breasts</strong>: 0.5 bits<br>
<strong>other body structure</strong> (hips, ribs, hands, <em>etc</em>.): 2 bits</p>
<p><strong><em>total</em></strong>: 8 bits</p>
<p>Some of those aren't quite independent evidence (clothing/hair/posture/body) but even assuming conservatively that they are, people who are trying can get 6–8 bits of evidence with some careful observation. And assuming correct calibrations on base rates, that's not good enough to clock someone. So I feel all right about this.</p>
<p>In reality, of course, the people who will study me that closely are rare and if any strangers have ever clocked me anytime after three months of transition they're super good at hiding it. So, yay?</p>
<p>Notice that this is a very different prospect than "Here's a trans person trying to pass. What evidence can you find that they're trans?" Well, there's lots! Who cares, as long as it's comfortably under 9–10 bits?</p>Interlude XIII2018-08-25T17:20:00-07:002018-08-25T17:20:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-08-25:/2018/Aug/interlude-xiii/<p>"Hi, my name is John, and my pronouns are he/him."</p>
<p>"Hi! My name is Mark, and <a href="http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/archive/files/havel-power-of-the-powerless_be62e5917d.pdf">I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient</a>."
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Interlude XII2018-08-07T21:37:00-07:002018-08-07T21:37:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-08-07:/2018/Aug/interlude-xii/<p>"I can understand why you might think that there are five lights—indeed, that would make a lot of things easier—but actually, <a href="http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Chain_of_Command,_Part_II_(episode)">there are only four lights</a>. Yes, it's a little bit counterintuitive, and I know I got a little bit frustrated and said some things I now regret …</p><p>"I can understand why you might think that there are five lights—indeed, that would make a lot of things easier—but actually, <a href="http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Chain_of_Command,_Part_II_(episode)">there are only four lights</a>. Yes, it's a little bit counterintuitive, and I know I got a little bit frustrated and said some things I now regret when I was trying to explain this earlier, such that some people might justifiably suspect that I am irrationally emotionally-attached to the four-lights hypothesis and guilty of motivated reasoning, and I totally agree that you should definitely take that possibility into account insofar as you are unable to count the lights yourself and are deciding how much you should update based on my report.</p>
<p>"Nevertheless, there are, in fact, four lights. It's OK if you don't believe me, but I counted them, and I recounted them a few more times, and I'm not going to pretend to be confused about the number of lights unless I discover some specific reason to suspect that I miscounted in the same way every time."</p>Reply to The Unit of Caring on Adult Human Females2018-04-19T18:00:00-07:002018-04-19T18:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-04-19:/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/<blockquote>
<p>Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement.</p>
<p>—<a href="https://twitter.com/luminousalicorn/status/839542071547441152">Alicorn</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog <a href="https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and"><em>The Unit of Caring</em> responds to</a> an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word <em>woman</em> as "adult human biological female":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oh, yeah, sorry, I've …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement.</p>
<p>—<a href="https://twitter.com/luminousalicorn/status/839542071547441152">Alicorn</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog <a href="https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and"><em>The Unit of Caring</em> responds to</a> an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word <em>woman</em> as "adult human biological female":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Oh, yeah, sorry, I've heard that one too though I've yet to find anyone willing to justify it. If you can find anyone explaining why this is a good definition, or even explaining what good properties it has, I'd appreciate it because I did sincerely put in the effort and—uncharitably, it's as if there's just 'matches historical use' and 'doesn't involve any people I consider icky being in my category'.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I'm happy to try to help if I can!</p>
<p>I would say that a notable good property of the "adult human female" definition is <em>non-circularity</em>: we can articulate membership tests that do a pretty good job of narrowing down which entities <em>do</em> and <em>do not</em> belong to the category we're trying to talk about, <em>without</em> appealing to the category itself. Does the person have a vagina, ovaries, breasts, and two X chromosomes? That's a woman. Has the person given birth? <em>Definitely</em> a woman. Does the person have a penis? Definitely <em>not</em> a woman. This at least gives us a starting point from which we can begin to use this <em>woman</em> concept to make sense of the world, even if it's not immediately clear whether and how we should apply it to various comparatively rare edge-cases. (What about female-to-male transsexuals, a.k.a. trans men? What about people with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome">complete androgen insensitivity syndrome</a>? <em>&c.</em>)</p>
<p>In contrast, a strict gender-identity-based definition doesn't have this useful non-circularity property. If all I know about <em>women</em> is that women are defined as people who identify as women, I can't <em>use</em> that definition to figure out which people are women. This point may be more apparent if you substitute some completely foreign concept for <em>women</em>. If someone told you that zorplebobben are people who identify as zorplebobben, you would probably have questions about what that means! <em>Why</em> do they identify as zorplebobben? <em>Given</em> that someone is a zorplebobben, what <em>else</em> should I infer about them? The self-identity criterion doesn't help: without a base case, the infinite recursion of (people who identify as (people who identify as (people who identify as ...))) never terminates.</p>
<p>Of course, people who believe in the primacy of gender identity aren't <em>trying</em> to engage in circular reasoning. If they <em>are</em> making a philosophical mistake, there has to be some explanation of what makes the mistake appealing enough for so many people to make it.</p>
<p>But it's not hard to guess: there are, empirically, a small-but-not-vanishingly-small minority of people with a penis, XY chromosomes, facial hair, <em>&c.</em> who <em>wish</em> that they had a vagina, XX chromosomes, breasts, <em>&c.</em>, and in a enlightened technological civilization, it seems humane to accommodate this desire as much as feasible, by giving people access to hormones and surgeries that approximate the phenotype of the other sex, respecting their chosen pronouns, <em>&c.</em> Thus we can legitimately end up with a <em>non</em>-circular trans-inclusive sense of the word <em>women</em>: "adult human females, and also adult human males who have undergone interventions to resemble adult human females sufficiently closely so that they can be taken as such socially."</p>
<p>But this is a mere broadening of the "adult human female" definition that tacks on extra complexity (partially for humanitarian reasons and partially to better predict social phenomena that most people care more about modeling well than biological minutiæ). The core idea is still intact and centered, such that even if we end up using the disjunctive, trans-inclusive sense a lot of the time, the narrower, trans-exclusive sense is still pretty salient, rather than being a perplexingly unmotivated notion with no good properties.</p>
<p>One might counterargue that this is unjustifiably assuming "biologically female" as a primitive. The author seems to endorse a critique along these lines the first of three objections to the "adult human female" criterion of womanhood—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>1) The way we draw categories in biology is a social decision we make for social and cultural reasons, it isn’t a feature of the biology itself. A different sort of society might categorize infertile humans as a separate gender, for example, and that'd be as justified by the biology as our system. Or have 'prepubescent' be a gender, or 'having living offspring' be a gender—there are a million things that these categories could just as reasonably, from the biology, have been drawn around.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I've addressed this class of argument at length (about 6500 words) in a previous post, <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/">"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"</a>, but to summarize <em>briefly</em>, while I <em>agree</em> that categories can be defined in many ways to suit different cultural priorities, it's also the case that not all possible categories are equally useful, because the cognitive function of categories is to group similar things together so that we can make similar predictions about them, and not every possible grouping of entities yields a "tight" distribution of predictions that can be usefully abstracted over.</p>
<p>A free-thinking biologist certainly <em>could</em> choose to reject the orthodoxy of grouping living things by ancestry and reproductive isolation and instead choose to study living things that are yellow, but their treatises would probably be difficult to follow, because "living things that are yellow" is intrinsically a much less cohesive subject matter than, say, "birds": experience with black crows is probably going to be <em>more</em> useful when studying yellow canaries than experience with yellow daffodils—even if, <em>in all philosophical strictness</em>, there are a million things that these categories could have been drawn around, and who can say but that some hypothetical other culture might have chosen color rather than ancestry as the true determinant of "species"?</p>
<p>It is of course true that different cultures will place different emphases and interpretations on various ways in which people can differ: being prepubescent or being a parent might have special significance in some cultures that outsiders could never understand. But to say that prepubescents might as well be a "gender"—well, at this point I must confess that I'm really not sure what this "gender" thing is that the author is trying to talk about.</p>
<p>And I guess that's the problem. People who assume a TERFy definition of <em>woman</em>—like, say, the authors of the Merriam–Webster dictionary <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman">("noun, <strong>1.a.</strong>, an adult female person")</a>—generally aren't trying to invalidate anyone's "gender"; they're trying to talk about <em>biological sex</em> using simple, universally-understood words. Biological sex is obviously not the only category in the world: in a lot of situations, you might care more about whether someone has living children—or for that matter, whether an organism is yellow—than what sex it is.</p>
<p>But when people <em>do</em> want to talk about sex—when they want to carve reality along that <em>particular</em> joint, without denying that there are <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words">superexponentially</a> many others in the vastness of configuration space—there's something <em>profoundly frustrating</em> about <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/">Blue Tribe</a> culture's axiomatic insistence that certain inferences <em>must not</em> be made, that certain conceptual distinctions must not be <em>expressible</em>, except perhaps cloaked behind polysyllabic obfuscations like "assigned sex at birth" (as if the doctors made a <em>mistake</em>!).</p>
<p>Even if many usages of words like <em>woman</em> can and should be interpreted in a trans-inclusive sense, it's important that it also be possible to sometimes use the words in a trans-exclusive sense in those cases where the distributions of trans people and cis people of a given "gender" differ significantly for the variables of interest. The point is not to be mean to trans women (who are a huge fraction of my and <em>The Unit of Caring</em> author's friends); the point is that it should be socially acceptable to <em>describe reality using words</em>.</p>
<p>Consider these fictional (but, I fear, distressingly realistic) dialogues—</p>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<div class="dialogue">
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: I think it was <em>terribly</em> unfair how <a href="/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/">that high school track championship was won by</a> a male-to-female transgender person who wasn't even on hormone replacement therapy!</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: I don't see the problem. It's a girl's track meet. Trans girls <em>are</em> girls, <em>by definition</em>. Why <em>shouldn't</em> they be allowed to compete with other girls?</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: ...</p>
</div>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<div class="dialogue">
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: I'm sad that the sex ratio of my local decision-theory and compiler-development unified meetup group is so horribly lopsided, because this observation is in tension with my <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/">beautiful and sacred moral ideal</a> of neither sex having a monopoly on any kind of virtue! If there's anything my native subcultures are doing to needlessly antagonize women, then that's <em>wrong</em> and I want to <em>fix it</em>!</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: What are you talking about? There were lots of women at that meetup.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: I mean, yes, but literally all of us were trans.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: So?</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: ...</p>
</div>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<div class="dialogue">
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Have you seen <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885">Dhejne <em>et al.</em>'s long-term followup study of transsexuals in Sweden</a>? In Tables S1 and S2, the authors report that trans women committed violent crimes at far higher rates than cis women, with an adjusted-for-immigrant-and-psychiatric-status hazard ratio of 18.1—but only slightly lower rates than cis men, against whom the adjusted hazard ratio was 0.8.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Yes, how terrible that we still live in such a transphobic Society that those poor marginalized trans women are disproportionately driven to violent crime!</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: That's one theory. Can you think of any <em>other</em> possible interpretations of the data?</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: No.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Like, what do you make of the observation that the trans women's violent crime rate was not just higher than cis women's, but also strikingly close to that of cis <em>men</em>? Can you think of any reason—any reason at all—why that <em>might not be a coincidence</em>?</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: No, that has to be a coincidence. What could trans women and cis men possibly have in common?</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: ...</p>
</div>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<p>(Another dialogue about reproduction belongs in this collection, but was deemed too obvious and has been cut for space.)</p>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<p>The point being illustrated here is that if it's socially unacceptable for people who want to talk about sex to say "That's not what I meant by <em>woman</em> in this context <em>and you know it</em>", then people who would prefer not to acknowledge sex will always get the last word, not because they have superior arguments, but because the very terms of discourse have been <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">systematically gamed to conflate dissent with unkindness</a>.</p>
<p>To this it might be objected that trans activists and allies are merely advocating for greater precision, rather than trying to make it socially unacceptable to think about biological sex: after all, you can just say "cis women" (which excludes trans women, trans men, and natal-female nonbinary people) or "assigned female at birth" (which excludes trans women, but includes trans men and natal-female nonbinary people and presumably <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer">David Reimer</a>) or "people with uteruses" (which excludes trans women and natal females who have had a hysterectomy) if that's what you <em>really mean</em>.</p>
<p>Alternatively, we could imagine people agreeing that word <em>woman</em> refers solely to social roles and personal identity and must always be used in a trans-inclusive sense, while reserving <em>female</em> for when people want to talk about biological sex. However, I get the sense that this is not a compromise most contemporary trans activists would find acceptable: witness, for example, <a href="https://archive.is/Fpaw3">Zinnia Jones proclaiming that</a> "[t]rans women are female—with female penises, female prostates, female sperm, and female XY chromosomes." (!)</p>
<p>Ultimately, I think all this is underestimating the usefulness of having simple, <a href="https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes"><em>short</em></a> descriptions for the categories that do the most predictive work on typical cases.</p>
<p>Kind or not, morally justified or not, voluntary or not, sexual dimorphism is <em>actually a real thing</em>. Studying the pages of <em>Gray's Anatomy</em>—<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology">or <em>Wikipedia</em></a> if you're on a budget—you can absorb all sorts of detailed, <em>specific</em> knowledge of the differences between female and male humans, from the obvious (sex organs, vocal pitch, height, muscle mass, body hair) to the less-obvious-but-well-known (chromosomes, hormones, pelvis shape) to the comparatively obscure (blood pressure! lymphocyte concentrations! gray-matter-to-white-matter ratios in the brain!). Nor is this surprising from a theoretical standpoint, where we have theories explaining <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy">mechanisms</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection">by which</a> sexual dimorphism can evolve and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parental_investment&oldid=832276512#Trivers'_parental_investment_theory">what kinds of differences</a> it produces in different species.</p>
<p>If—like me—you're the kind of person who is not necessarily <em>happy</em> about sexual dimorphism, you can always deliberately define your categories in order to minimize it: if there's a large sex difference in some observable measurement, just say you <em>don't care</em> about predicting that particular measurement.</p>
<p>But people who have <em>other</em> concerns than minimizing Blue Tribe people's quasi-religious discomfort with sexual dimorphism (it's my former quasi-religion, too, so I'm allowed to make fun of us) might want a common word—or even just a particular <em>sense</em> of a common word—to describe the world they see, in which sex is a real thing worth noticing.</p>
<p>It might be worth noticing even if you don't believe in psychological sex differences! That's why generations of feminists have fought valiantly for women's rights on the grounds that women are every bit the moral and intellectual equals of men, rather than the grounds that it's not clear whether "women" actually exist as a non-arbitrary category.</p>
<p>Being limited to just saying "people with uteruses" when the topic of conversation happens to be childbearing (or whatever the approved socially-just construction turns out to be) is not a suitable replacement (per Alicorn's maxim) when the speaker wants to refer to all the <em>other</em> dimensions along which women statistically have things in common, including things that are hard to articulate or measure.</p>
<p>And including things that may not even be currently <em>known</em>. <em>I</em> certainly don't know what differences in gray-to-white brain matter ratios <em>mean</em> psychologically, but my map is not the territory: it doesn't mean some future sufficiently-advanced neuroscience won't be able to say what the difference means about female and male minds, and some sufficiently advanced evolutionary psychology, under what selection pressures it evolved.</p>
<p><em>Speaking</em> of future advances in knowledge, the author continues to her second objection—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>2) Someday people are just going to be able to generate the exact physical body they want to inhabit. At that point, "biological" anything isn't going to apply.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I definitely agree that biological anything isn't going to apply in the glorious posthuman future of unimaginable power and freedom when people can reshape their body and mind at will.</p>
<p><a href="https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html">(If we survive.)</a></p>
<p>But it's also not clear how much relevance this science-fictional scenario has to people in the unglorious preposthuman present. Yes, we do have HRT and SRS, and these are magnificent achievements for the grand cause of morphological freedom, and should be available on an informed-consent basis. It's definitely something.</p>
<p>But it's also definitely not-everything. To get a sense of how far we have to go, I strongly recommend reading <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">Eliezer Yudkowsky's heartbreaking 2009 take</a> on what an actually effective male-to-female sex change would take.</p>
<p>In my youth, I used to be more optimistic about the future of human enhancement. "Oh, sure, that may be true of <em>present-day humans</em>, but <em>in general</em> ..." felt like a relevant and useful form of argument.</p>
<p>These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. <em>In principle</em>, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very <em>specific</em> miracles that depend on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.</p>
<p>I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their blessed lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which <a href="https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/">we can't write correct software</a>, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200210091741/https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/">aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even <em>exist</em></a>, and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/">don't remember how to go the moon</a> or <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200617220922/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/">build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile</a>. But while we work towards a better future (<em>n.b.</em>, <em>work towards</em>, not <em>wait for</em>; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard">our means don't match our ambitions</a>, and—as we typically recognize with respect to <em>other</em> standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—</p>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<div class="dialogue">
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: When I lost my mother, I knew I could not rest until Death itself is defeated!</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: But as long as you remember her, your mother lives on in you!</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: I mean, metaphorically yes, but I meant <em>death</em> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death">as in, like</a>, the cessation of all biological functions that sustain a living organism.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Oh, yeah, sorry, I've heard that one, too, though I've yet to find anyone willing to justify it. If you can find anyone explaining why this is a good definition, or even explaining what good properties it has, I'd appreciate it, because I did sincerely put in the effort and—uncharitably, it's as if there's just 'matches historical use' and 'doesn't involve icky people from the past being in my category'.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: ...</p>
</div>
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<p>The <em>Unit of Caring</em> author continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If your definition of a 'woman' is one where trans people will be their preferred gender once the tech catches up, then I think you should probably reflect on what actually changes about anyone's lived experience on that magic day when our cyborgs hit your threshold. And if it isn't, then you're stuck asserting that if a woman is cell-for-cell identical to me then she still might not be a 'biological woman'. That's a sign that this isn't actually about biology.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would rather say that's a sign that we're facing an instance of the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/">Sorites paradox</a>, the ancient challenge to applying discrete categories to a continuous world. If one grain of sand doesn't make a heap (the argument goes), and the addition of one more grain of sand can't change whether something is a heap, then we can conclude from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction">the principle of mathematical induction</a> that no number <em>n</em> ∈ ℕ of grains make a heap. (Or, alternatively, that the absence of any sand constitutes a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nso8WXdjHLLHkJKhr/the-conscious-sorites-paradox">"heap of zero grains"</a>.) Analogously, if a sufficiently small change in MtF transition outcome can't change whether someone is a woman, then we are seemingly forced to accept that either everyone is a woman or no one is.</p>
<p>While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than to concede that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you brought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesitate to say, "That's not what I meant by <em>heap</em> in this context <em>and you know it</em>."</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If that's the side of this question you come down on, then I encourage you to ask yourself why that trans women still doesn't count. I expect that whatever your answer, that's the real definition you’re using, not "biological".</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I definitely agree that this is a valuable thought experiment: in this limit of perfect physical transition technology, what possible reasons could there be to deny that trans women are women? Allow me to give a conditional answer.</p>
<p><em>If</em> psychological sex differences aren't real, then there aren't any: <em>ex hypothesi</em>, the physiological differences between females and males are the only thing for the word <em>woman</em> to attach to, and <em>ex hypothesi</em>, we know how to fix those.</p>
<p>Alternatively, <em>if</em> psychological sex differences <em>are</em> a thing, <em>and</em> transness is a brain intersex condition such that pre-transition trans women are <em>already</em> psychologically female, then again, there aren't any: <em>ex hypothesi</em> <em>&c.</em></p>
<p>However, <em>if</em> we should be so unlucky to live in a world in which psychological sex differences <em>are</em> a thing <em>and</em> most trans women are motivated to transition by <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html">some <em>other</em> reason</a> than already having female minds, then we face some subtleties: if our thought-experimental perfect transition tech doesn't edit minds, then we end up with a bunch of female-bodied people with a distribution of psychologies that isn't just not-identical to that of natal females, but is actually coming out of the <em>male</em> distribution. Should such people be called women? Honestly, I lean towards <em>Yes</em>, but I can at least <em>see the argument</em> of someone who preferred not to use the word that way.</p>
<p>Wrapping up—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>3) What does this definition of 'woman' get you?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It gets us a concept to refer to the set of adult human females. (Even if, again, we often also use the word <em>woman</em> in a broader trans-inclusive sense; it's not uncommon for words to have both narrower and broader definitions which can be distinguished from context.)</p>
<p>If the concept of <em>women</em> in the narrow, trans-exclusionary sense is to be forbidden from polite Society, then people trying to make sense of their experiences will be forced to reinvent it, probably by means of obfuscatory neologisms ("assigned female at birth") coupled with the quietly indefatigable <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences">wordless anticipation</a> that it's <em>somehow not a coincidence</em> that cis women and trans men and a.f.a.b. nonbinary people get pregnant sometimes, but cis men and trans women and a.m.a.b. nonbinary people never do.</p>
<p>I <em>want</em> to live in that glorious future of Total Morphological Freedom. But <em>nature to be commanded must be obeyed</em>. To <em>get</em> godlike mastery over our physical forms, to <em>break free</em> of the prison of today's unremediated genderspace, is going to require a detailed understanding of exactly how things work <em>today</em>, as it is only from such knowledge that pallative interventions can be designed. And, bluntly, the fact that <em>the smartest people I know</em> tend to direct more of their effort towards redefining top-20 nouns than on biotechnology research, does not exactly inspire confidence or hope.</p>The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions2018-02-23T08:45:00-08:002018-02-23T08:45:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-02-23:/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/<blockquote>
<p>I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."</p>
<p>"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."</p>
<p>—<em>Distress</em> by Greg Egan</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"</a>, the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or …</p><blockquote>
<p>I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."</p>
<p>"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."</p>
<p>—<em>Distress</em> by Greg Egan</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">"The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"</a>, the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or false in themselves, but rather can only be evaluated by their usefulness. Our finite minds being unable to cope with the unimaginable complexity of the raw physical universe, we group sufficiently similar things into the same category so that we can make similar <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences">predictions</a> about them—but this requires not only a metric of "similarity", but also a notion of which predictions one cares about enough to notice, both of which are relative to some agent's perspective, rather than being inherent in the world itself.</p>
<p>And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't <em>wrong</em> to classify whales as a type of <em>dag</em> (typically translated as <em>fish</em>), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals are phylogenetically related. Similarly, borders between countries are agreed upon for a variety of pragmatic reasons, and can be quite convoluted. While there may often be some "obvious" geographic or cultural Schelling points anchoring these decisions, there's not going to be any intrinsic, eternal fact of the matter as to where one country starts and another begins.</p>
<p>All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200529221511/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/">motte</a> for the less honest sort of <em>Slate Star Codex</em> reader to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on gerrymandered redefinitions of everyday concepts.</p>
<p>Alexander goes on to attempt to use the categories-are-relative-to-goals insight to rebut skeptics of transgenderedness:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I've seen one anti-transgender argument around that I take very seriously. The argument goes: we are rationalists. Our entire shtick is trying to believe what's actually true, not on what we wish were true, or what our culture tells us is true, or what it's popular to say is true. If a man thinks he's a woman, then we might (empathetically) wish he were a woman, other people might demand we call him a woman, and we might be much more popular if we say he's a woman. But if we're going to be rationalists who focus on believing what's actually true, then we've got to call him a man and take the consequences.</p>
<p>Thus Abraham Lincoln's famous riddle: "If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" And the answer: "Four—because a tail isn't a leg regardless of what you call it."</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>I take this argument very seriously, because sticking to the truth really is important. But having taken it seriously, I think it's seriously wrong.</p>
<p>An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But this is just giving up <em>way</em> too easily. The map is not the territory, and many very different kinds of maps can correspond to the territory in different ways—we have geographical maps, political maps, road maps, globes, <em>&c.</em>—but that doesn't mean <em>no map is in error</em>. Rationalists can't insist on using the one true categorization system, because it turns out that—in all philosophical strictness—no such thing exists. But that doesn't release us from our sacred duty to describe what's actually true. It just leaves us faced with the <em>slightly more complicated</em> task of describing the costs and benefits of different categorization systems with respect to different criteria.</p>
<p>There's no objective answer to the question as to whether we should pay more attention to an animal's evolutionary history or its habitat—but given one criterion or the other, we can say definitively that whales <em>are</em> mammals but they're also <em>dagim</em>/water-dwellers. And this isn't just a matter of <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/ns/empty_labels/">mere labels</a> that contain no more information than we used to define them. The categories do cognitive work: given that we observe that whales are endotherms that nurse their live-born young, we can assign them to the category <em>mammal</em> and predict—correctly—that they have hair and have a more recent last common ancestor with monkeys than with herring, even if we haven't yet seen the hairs or found the last common ancestor. Alternatively, given that we've been told that "whales" live in the ocean, we can assign them to the category <em>water-dwellers</em>, and predict—correctly—that they're likely to have fins or flippers, even if we've never actually seen a whale ourselves.</p>
<p>This works because, empirically, mammals have lots of things in common with each other and water-dwellers have lots of things in common with each other. If we <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/">imagine entities as existing in a high-dimensional configuration space</a>, there would be a <em>mammals</em> cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that mammals are similar on), and a <em>water-dwellers</em> cluster (in the subspace of the dimensions that water-dwellers are similar on), and whales would happen to belong to <em>both</em> of them, in the way that the vector <em>x⃗</em> = [3.1, 4.2, −10.3, −9.1] ∈ ℝ⁴ is close to [3, 4, 2, 3] in the <em>x₁-x₂</em> plane, but also close to [−8, −9, −10, −9] in the <em>x₃-x₄</em> plane.</p>
<p><a id=describing-the-conflict></a>If different political factions are engaged in conflict over how to define the extension of some common word—common words being a scarce and valuable resource both culturally and <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/o1/entropy_and_short_codes/">information-theoretically</a>—rationalists may not be able to say that one side is simply right and the other is simply wrong, but we can at least strive for objectivity in <em>describing the conflict</em>. Before shrugging and saying, "Well, this is a difference in values; nothing more to be said about it," we can talk about the detailed consequences of what is gained or lost by paying attention to some differences and ignoring others. That there exists an element of subjectivity in what you choose to pay attention to, doesn't negate the fact that there <em>is</em> a structured empirical reality to be described—and not all descriptions of it are equally compact.</p>
<p>In terms of the Lincoln riddle: you <em>can</em> call a tail a leg, but you can't stop people from <em>noticing</em> that out of a dog's five legs, one of them is different from the others. You can't stop people from inferring decision-relevant implications from what they notice. (<em>Most</em> of a dog's legs touch the ground, such that you'd have to carry the dog to the vet if one of them got injured, but the dog can still walk without the other, different leg.) And if people who live and work with dogs every day find themselves habitually distinguishing between the bottom-walking-legs and the back-wagging-leg, they <em>just might</em> want <em>different words</em> in order to concisely <em>talk</em> about what everyone is thinking <em>anyway</em>.</p>
<hr>
<p>So far, I probably haven't actually said anything that Alexander didn't already say in the original post. ("A category 'fish' containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid [...] it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it.") But it seems worth it for me to restate and emphasize that categories derive their usefulness from the way in which they efficiently represent regularities in the real world, because on the topic of exactly how to apply these philosophical insights to transgender identity claims, Alexander strangely—uncharacteristically—doesn't seem to find it necessary to make any arguments about representing the real world, preferring instead to focus on the mere fact that some people strongly prefer self-identity-based gender categories:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I'm willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy—and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me—then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is true in a tautological sense: if you deliberately gerrymander your category boundaries in order to get the answer you want, you can get the answer you want, which is great for people who want that answer, and people who don't want to hurt their feelings (and who don't mind <a href="/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/">letting themselves get emotionally blackmailed</a><sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-1-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-1 class=simple-footnote title="It is tempting to interpret Alexander's Turkish special forces reference as particularly telling in this light.">1</a></sup>).</p>
<p>But it's not very interesting to people like rationalists—although apparently not all people who <em>self-identify</em> as rationalists—who want to use concepts to <em>describe reality</em>.</p>
<p>Alexander gives an account of a woman whose ability to function at her job was being disrupted by obsessive-compulsive fears of leaving her hair dryer on at home, whose problems were solved by the simple expediency of taking the hair dryer with her when leaving the house. Given that it <em>worked</em> to resolve her distress, we shouldn't care that this isn't how problems that are categorized as <em>obsessive-compulsive disorder</em> are "supposed" to be treated, and Alexander argues that the same should go for accepting transgender identity claims: if it <em>works</em> for resolving people's gender dysphoria, why not?</p>
<p>The problem is that there are <em>significant disanalogies</em> between individually leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and collectively agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. Most significantly: the former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects <em>everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex</em>. The words <em>man</em> and <em>woman</em> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns">are top-20 nouns</a>! People need those nouns to describe their experiences!</p>
<p>Even if it's only a small cost to be socially required to say <em>woman</em> and <em>she</em> to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a <em>man</em>—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, <em>&c.</em>—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that <em>she</em> might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that <em>someone</em> might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.</p>
<p>It's important to stress that this should <em>not</em> be taken to mean that transgender identities should be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a <em>non</em>-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization.</p>
<p>The pre-verbal, subconscious, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dual_process_theory&oldid=820860981#Systems">System 1</a> process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/">subtle differences in motor behaviors</a> that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, <em>&c.</em>), mentally categorize them as a <em>woman</em> or a <em>man</em>, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not <em>directly</em> focused on genitalia or chromosomes.</p>
<p>So a natal female who presents to the world as a man, and whom other people <em>model</em> as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might be said to be a man in the sense of social gender (but not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using for him, and therefore, the social class that he actually functions as a member of. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you <em>really</em> want to call <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg">this person</a> a woman?"</p>
<p>Well, no. But the point is that this is an <em>empirical</em> argument for why successfully socially-transitioned trans people fit into <em>existing</em> concepts of gender, <em>not</em> a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works <em>because</em> and <em>to the extent that</em> transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition <em>isn't</em> always effective, or insofar as people <em>do</em> have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-2-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-2 class=simple-footnote title="E.g., discussions of reproduction">2</a></sup>—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.</p>
<hr>
<p>Another factor affecting the degree to which trans people form a more natural category with their identified gender than their natal sex is the nature of transgenderedness itself. If gender dysphoria is caused by a brain-restricted intersex condition, such that trans people's psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex—if the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope is basically accurate—that would tend to weigh in favor of accepting transgender identity claims: trans women would be "coming from the same place" as cis<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-3-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-3 class=simple-footnote title="A note on terminology: I'm using the conventional term cis as a briefer way of saying "not trans," despite some misgivings about how some authors define cis to mean something like "having a gender identity in concordance with one's assigned sex at birth", which, in conjunction with cis being used as a negation of trans, erases people who do have gender problems, but don't formulate them in terms of "gender identity" and aren't transitioning. See also cis by default.">3</a></sup> women in a very literal psychological sense, despite their natal physiology.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if gender dysphoria is caused by something else, that would tend to weigh against accepting transgender identity claims: however strongly felt trans people's <em>subjective</em> sense of gender identity might be, if the mechanism underlying that feeling actually has nothing in particular in common with anything people of the identified-with sex feel, it becomes relatively more tempting to classify the subjective sense of gender identity as an illusion, rather than the joint in reality around which everyone needs to carve their gender categories.<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-4-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-4 class=simple-footnote title="It shouldn't be surprising that people can be mistaken about the nature of their subjective experiences. A trans man who reports knowing himself to be a man is expressing the hypothesis that his subjective experience is the same as that of typical natal males in the relevant aspects, but this is an empirical claim that could be falsified by sufficiently advanced neuroscience.">4</a></sup></p>
<p>Of course, the phrasing <em>If gender dysphoria is caused by ...</em> implies that we're considering <em>gender dysphoria</em> <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nw/fallacies_of_compression/">as one category</a> to reason about homogeneously. But different people might want to transition for very different underlying psychological reasons. What categories we use may not be a question of simple fact that we can get wrong, but if, empirically, there happens to be a sufficiently robust statistical structure to the simple facts of the cases—if some people want to transition for reason <em>A</em> and tend to have traits <em>W</em> and <em>X</em>, but others want to transition for reason <em>B</em> and have traits <em>Y</em> and <em>Z</em>—then aspiring epistemic rationalists may find it useful to distinguish multiple, distinct psychological conditions that all happen to cause gender dysphoria as a symptom.</p>
<p>Analogously, in medicine, many different pathogens can cause the same symptoms (<em>e.g.</em>, sneezing, or fever), but doctors care about distinguishing different illnesses by etiology, not just symptoms, because distinct physical mechanisms can give rise to distinct treatment decisions, if not immediately, then at least in principle. For example, a bacterial illness will respond to antibiotics, but a viral one won't—or today's treatments might be equally effective against two different species of bacteria, but future drugs might work better on one or the other.</p>
<p><a id=two-types></a><em>As it happens</em>, (I claim that) the evidence that gender dysphoria comprises more than one etiologically distinct condition is quite strong. For the rest of this post, I'm going to focus on the male-to-female case for reasons of personal interest,<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-5-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-5 class=simple-footnote title="See many other posts on this blog.">5</a></sup> quality of available research,<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-6-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-6 class=simple-footnote title="The etiology of trans men is less well-researched than that of trans women: while there is a gynephilic group whose blurry etiological boundary with butch lesbians looks like a fairly straightforward analogue of the relationship between androphilic trans women and feminine gay men, it's less clear whether autoandrophilia ("love of oneself as a man") might play a similar role for non-gynephilic trans men as autogynephilia does in the male-to-female case—and the distribution of trans men may be changing in recent years.">6</a></sup> and because no one cares about trans men.<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-7-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-7 class=simple-footnote title="Less glibly: discussions of the social implications of transgenderedness tend to focus on trans women, likely because trans men tend to pass better, and because insofar as the intended purpose of many sex-segregated social contexts is to protect females from males, biologically-female trans men aren't perceived as a threat: cis men are assumed to be able to take care of their own interests.">7</a></sup> An analysis of the female-to-male situation would be similar in many respects but different in others, and is left to the interested reader.</p>
<p>A minority of male-to-female transsexuals exhibit lifelong sex-atypical behavior and interests, are attracted to men<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-8-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-8 class=simple-footnote title="N.b., the typical female sexual orientation">8</a></sup>, and transition early in life (typically no later than their early twenties). Essentially, these are physiological males whose psychology is so far outside of the male normal range along so many dimensions that they find themselves more comfortable and socially successful living as women rather than as extremely effeminate gay men. This likely <em>is</em> a brain-intersex condition: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male_sexual_orientation">along with non-gender-dysphoric gay men</a>, they <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-011-9777-6">have a statistical preponderance of older brothers</a> which is <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/115/2/302">theorized to be due to the mother's immune system response to male fetuses affecting the development of later pregnancies</a>.</p>
<p>However, the majority of male-to-female trans people in Western countries do not fit this profile. They are attracted to women or are bisexual and, while reporting a desire to be female dating back to puberty or earlier in childhood, they don't exhibit an <em>unusual</em> number of female-typical traits compared to other males. In contrast to the "early-onset", androphilic type, who couldn't fit in to the world as men if they tried, this second group of "late-onset", non-exclusively-androphilic gender-dysphoric males <em>can</em> function socially as men; we<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-9-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-9 class=simple-footnote title="I think I'm justified in counting myself in this taxon even though I'm choosing not to transition.">9</a></sup> just—aspire to a higher form of existence. The covertness of late-onset gender dysphoria explains why someone like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlyn_Jenner">Caitlyn Jenner</a> can have a long, successful public existence as a man—winning men's decathalons, racing sports cars, marrying women and fathering children—before eventually deciding to transition at age 65.</p>
<p>This proposed two-type taxonomy of trans women is very controversial, probably in large part because it's part of a theory that claims that the late-onset type is rooted in an unusual sexual interest termed <em>autogynephilia</em> ("love of oneself as a woman"). Anne Lawrence, herself a self-identified autogynephilic transsexual, iconically describes autogynephiles as <a href="http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf">"men who love women and want to become what they love."</a></p>
<p>A review of the empirical evidence for the two-type taxonomy is beyond the scope of this post. To interested or skeptical readers who only have time to read one paper, I recommend Lawrence's <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf">"Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"</a>; for a more exhaustive treatment, see the first two chapters of Lawrence's monograph <a href="https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf"><em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies</em></a> or follow the links and citations in <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/">Kay Brown's FAQ</a>.</p>
<p>To avoid the main ideas of this post getting mired in <em>unnecessary</em> controversy, I'd like to emphasize that it's possible to reject the hypothesis that autogynephilia is the <em>cause</em> of the second type, while <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/against-blanchardianism/">still agreeing that</a> there observationally seem to be <em>at least</em> two types of trans women, with the late-onset/non-exclusively-androphilic type or types being much less overtly feminine and not sharing the etiology of the early-onset/androphilic type.<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-10-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-10 class=simple-footnote title="To be clear, I do think autogynephilia has a causal role in late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but justifying that can be left to other posts; arguments can only be strengthened by leaving out burdensome details.">10</a></sup> Between the statistical signal in the psychology literature (I again defer to <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/">Brown's review</a>) and study of the public biographies of trans women (the life-arcs of people like Jenner or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wachowskis">the Wachowski sisters</a> <em>look different</em> from those of people like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Mock">Janet Mock</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverne_Cox">Laverne Cox</a>), I think this is hard to dispute.<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-11-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-11 class=simple-footnote title="But for reference, some of the most popular critiques of the typology (often—I claim erroneously—cited as debunkings) are Serano 2010 and Moser 2010.">11</a></sup></p>
<p>I <em>am</em>, however, supposing that the late-onset type or types is either not an intersex condition, or at <em>most</em>, a very mild one: we could perhaps imagine a gender identity "switch" in the brain that can get flipped around (explaining the eventual need to transition) without much affecting other sexually-dimorphic parts of the brain (explaining how transition could be delayed so long, and come as such a surprise to others). This hypothesis is weaker than the autogynephilia theory, but still has implications for the ways in which transgender identity claims might or might not be validated by natural, prediction-motivated categorization schemes. If most trans women's traits are noticeably <em>not drawn from from the female distribution</em>, that's a factor making it less practical to insist that others categorize them as women.</p>
<p><a id=different-types-of-women-objection></a>To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women. Clusters can internally have many subclusters: Pureto Rican women (or married women, or young women, or lesbians, <em>&c</em>.) don't have the <em>same</em> distribution of traits as women as a whole, and yet are still women. Why should "trans" be different from any other adjective one might use to specify a subcategory of women?</p>
<p>What makes this difficult is that—<em>conditional</em> on the two-types hypothesis and specifically gender dysphoria in non-exclusively-androphilic biological males being mostly not an intersex condition—most trans women aren't just not part of the female cluster in configuration space; they're specifically part of <em>male</em> cluster along most dimensions, which people <em>already</em> have a concept for. This doesn't mean that we can't get away with classifying them as women—there's nothing <em>stopping</em> us from drawing the category boundary however we want. But it <a href="/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/">isn't an arbitrary choice</a>—the concepts of <em>women</em>-as-defined-by-biological-sex, <em>women</em>-as-defined-by-self-identity, and <em>women</em>-as-defined-by-passing are picking out different (though of course mostly overlapping) regions of the configuration space, which has inescapable logical <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nx/categorizing_has_consequences/">consequences</a> on the kinds of inferences that can be made using each concept.</p>
<p><a href="/images/genderspace_cluster_choice.png"><img src="/images/genderspace_cluster_choice.png" width=532 height=421 alt="genderspace cluster choice"></a></p>
<aside class=boxout><strong>Figure.</strong> A schematic visualization of genderspace using fictitious but hopefully illustrative data <a href="/ancillary/categories-scatterplot-source/">(scatterplot source code)</a>. Suppose that the distributions of cis men (represented by the <span style="color: #1E90FF;">light blue</span> datapoints) and cis women (the <span style="color: #FF1493;">hot pink</span> points) have the same variance, but their means differ by 3.5 standard deviations in each of the <em>x₁</em>, <em>x₂</em>, and <em>x₃</em> variables, and that the distribution of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women (the <span style="color: #B000B0;">purple</span> points) is the same as that of cis men for the <em>x₁</em> and <em>x₂</em> variables, but resembles that of cis women for <em>x₃</em>. People who care more about predicting <em>x₁</em> and <em>x₂</em> have reason to prefer categories and corresponding language that group by natal sex (<span style="color: #0000C8;">blue</span> category boundary); people who care more about predicting <em>x₃</em> have reason to prefer categories and language that group by gender identity (<span style="color: #E00000;">red</span> boundary).</aside>
<p>In less tolerant places and decades, where MtF transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as (cis) women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference. This is why experienced crossdressers often report it being easier to pass in rural or suburban areas rather than cities with a larger LGBT presence—not as a matter of tolerant social attitudes, but as a matter of <em>base rates</em>: it's harder to get <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clocked&defid=4884301">clocked</a> by people who aren't aware that being trans is even a thing.<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-12-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-12 class=simple-footnote title="In predictive processing terms: the prediction errors caused by observations of a trans woman failing to match the observer's generative model of women get silenced for lack of alternative hypotheses if "She's trans" isn't in the observer's hypothesis space.">12</a></sup></p>
<p>Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, transness is definitely known to be a thing—and in particular subcultures that form around <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200619091119/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/">non-sex-balanced interests</a>, the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200602002139/https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/03/ssc-survey-results-2018/">2018 <em>Slate Star Codex</em> reader survey</a>, 9.4% of respondents selected <em>F (cisgender)</em> for the gender question, compared to 1.4% of respondents selecting <em>F (transgender m → f)</em>. So, if trans women are women, <em>13.4%</em> (!!) of women who read <em>Slate Star Codex</em> are trans.</p>
<p>I can't say this causes any problems, because that would depend on how you choose to draw the category boundaries around what constitutes a "problem." But objectively, injecting a substantial fraction of otherwise-mostly-ordinary-but-for-their-gender-dysphoria natal males into spaces and roles that developed around the distribution of psychologies of natal females <em>is</em> going to have consequences—consequences that some of the incumbent women might not be happy about.</p>
<p>A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of a very <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/">"Blue Tribe"</a> city's rationalist community<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-13-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-13 class=simple-footnote title="N.b., basically the same group of people generating the Slate Star Codex survey results just mentioned. Obviously, social circles not so heavily selected for the same undefinable habits of thought will have much less bizarre trans-to-cis-women ratios.">13</a></sup> reports on recent changes in local social norms—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There have been "all women" things, like clothing swaps or groups, that then pre-transitioned trans women show up to. And it's hard, because it's weird and uncomfortable once three or four participants of twelve are trans women. I think the reality that's happening is women are having those spaces less—instead doing private things "for friends," with specific invite lists that are implicitly understood not to include men or trans women. This sucks because then we can't include women who aren't <em>already</em> in our social circle, and we all know it but no one wants to say it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But this is a <em>terrible</em> outcome with respect to <em>everyone's</em> values. One can't even say, "Well, the cost to those bigoted cis women of not being able to have trans-exclusionary spaces is more than outweighed by trans women's identities being respected," because the non-passing trans women's identities <em>aren't</em> being respected <em>anyway</em>; it's just that (cis) women are collectively too <em>nice</em><sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-14-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-14 class=simple-footnote title="The sex difference in Big Five Agreeableness is around d≈0.5.">14</a></sup> to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200427201543/https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/">make it common knowledge</a>.</p>
<p>Another female friend of the blog writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think of women's restrooms as safe havens. If a suspicious looking man is following me on the street, or I am concerned about someone male being a danger to me because they are loud and shouty and sexist or catcalling, I will sometimes make a beeline for the nearest women's restroom because I know that is a safe haven. Other people might not intervene if someone is just suspiciously following me, but there is a strong taboo against men in women's restrooms and I feel confident that the men will either not follow me in there due to that taboo or other women will intervene if they do. It's also got useful plausible deniability: I, and potential bystanders, may not be willing to say "you are a possible instigator of violence and we feel unsafe" because that's rude, but we can say "you're not allowed in here, this is a woman's bathroom" because coming into the wrong bathroom is ruder. If that safe haven did not exist because there was no taboo against people who look male in female restrooms, I would be extremely distressed about the non-possibility of retreating somewhere safe, and be much less comfortable entering clubs or pubs or other public party/drink-themed spaces. It would likely cause me to not go to some of them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course, the existence of these complaints from women don't necessarily imply any particular policy position. One could say, "Cis women who don't want trans women in women's spaces need to unlearn their bigotry." (Consider that this is exactly what we say to white people who don't feel comfortable sharing water fountains with black people.) But it's important to at least recognize that this is an issue with real stakes on the "anti-trans" side as well as the "pro-trans" side. Critics of gender-as-self-identification aren't just being arbitrarily mean to trans people for no reason. A lot of women believe that they have an interest in having hospital wards and domestic violence shelters and <a href="/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/">sports leagues</a> and some social events without any obviously biologically-male people in them. Telling them that "the categories were made for man, not man for the categories" is <em>not addressing their concerns</em>—concerns that are about the actual distribution of bodies and minds in the real world that can't be changed by calling things different names.</p>
<hr>
<p>People should get what they want. We should have social norms that help people get what they want. I don't <em>know</em> what the optimal social norms about transitioning would be. As a transhumanist and as an individualist, I want to protect people's freedom to modify their body and social presentation, which <em>implies</em> the right to transition. For the same reasons, I want to protect freedom of association, which <em>implies</em> the right to be able to have sex-segregated spaces that are actually segregated by biological sex should there exist demand for that kind of space.</p>
<p>People should get what they want. Social science is hard and I want to <em>try</em> to avoid politics as much as I can.<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-15-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-15 class=simple-footnote title="Unfortunately, a very challenging goal in the gender blogging business.">15</a></sup> When different people's wants come into conflict, it's not for me to say what the optimal compromise is; it's too much for me to compute.</p>
<p><a id=pronoun-sticker-discourse></a>What I can say is that <em>whatever</em> the right thing to do is, we stand a better chance of getting there if we can be <em>honest</em> with each other about the world we see, using the most precise categories we can, to construct maps that reflect the territory. My model of the universe doesn't stop at the boundary of your body, and yours shouldn't stop at mine.</p>
<p>This is definitely compatible with transitioning. It is <em>not</em>, I claim, compatible with the ideology of gender-as-self-identification that is rapidly establishing a foothold in Society. Consider this display at a recent conference of the American Philosophical Association (note, the people whose <em>job</em> it is to use careful conceptual distinctions to understand reality)—</p>
<p><img alt="APA pronoun stickers" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/apa_pronoun_stickers.jpg"></p>
<p><span class=photo-credit><a href="https://twitter.com/Lucia_A_Schwarz/status/949315365842116608">(photograph by Lucia A. Schwarz)</a></span></p>
<p>But this isn't how <em>anyone</em> actually thinks about gender! The subconscious perceptual systems by which we notice people's sex aren't going to <em>turn off</em> because <em>a sign said so</em>. If you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, <em>your transition has failed</em>.</p>
<p>In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having done your best to present your true self, you can't—not even <em>shouldn't</em>, but <em>can't</em>—exert detailed control how other people perceive you.</p>
<p>All you can do is incentivize them to lie.</p>
<p>This is the other problem with gender-as-self-identification: passing is hard and not-passing hurts, so kind-hearted people try to protect their trans friends from the pain of not being read the way that they would prefer—with the inevitable result that the laudable instinct to be kind gets corrupted into <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200428132642/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/">universal socially-mandatory lies</a>. Even if you don't need predictively-natural categories for any particular practical decision—even if we were to collectively agree to integrate previously sex-segregated bathrooms and sports leagues and prisons so that no actual policy decision depended on what "gender" somebody is—as an aspiring <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/a-common-misunderstanding/">epistemic rationalist</a>, there's something spiritually deadening about a world in which the mental representations you need to <em>make sense</em> of the world can't be spoken about without layers of obfuscating euphemisms.</p>
<p><a href="/tag/ozy/">Friend of the blog</a> Ozymandias <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/">writes that the <em>Less Wrong</em> community doesn't have a gender gap</a>—we just have an <em>assigned sex at birth</em> gap. (Gee, that makes me feel <em>so much better</em>.)</p>
<p>I don't <em>want</em> to be "anti-trans." I can easily imagine <em>myself</em> transitioning (I've <a href="/tag/hrt-diary/">already experimented</a> with the relevant drugs), in a nearby possible past in which my analogue was braver and read different books in a different order, or a nearby possible future in which the technology gets better.</p>
<p>But when a man can do nothing but wear a sticker that says "SHE" and say, "Who are you going to believe, my sticker, or your lying eyes? There's no rule of rationality saying that you shouldn't believe the sticker, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should" and the <em>finest minds of my generation</em> can permit themselves no other response than, "She's absolutely correct; the categories were made for man, not man for the categories," I can only plead—</p>
<p>This is not rationality. This isn't even kindness. We're <em>smarter</em> than this.</p>
<hr>
<p><a id=emperor-norton></a>Alexander ends his post by citing, as "one of the most heartwarming episodes in the history of one of my favorite places in the world," the case of 19th century San Francisco resident <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton">Joshua Norton</a>, who proclaimed himself Emperor Norton I of the United States and Protector of Mexico and whose claims to power were widely humored by local citizens. Restaurants accepted currency issued in his name; the city's Board of Supervisors bought him a uniform.</p>
<p>Norton's story is certainly <em>entertaining to read about</em> a hundred and forty years after the fact. But before endorsing it as a model of humane behavior, I think it's worth dwelling on what it would be like to live through, not just read about as a historical curiosity.</p>
<p>What if one of your friends had a mental break and decided that they were Emperor of the United States? Would it be kind, fair, respectful to them for you to play along, and <em>keep</em> playing along for the rest of your lives? To solemnly defer to their imperial majesty to their face, and then gush about how heartwarmingly episodic it is when they're not around?</p>
<p>What if it were <em>you</em>?</p>
<p>It was me, once. I had a couple <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">psychotic</a> <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">episodes</a> last year, including some delusions of grandeur. At various points, I thought that I had been appointed Gender Czar of this equivalence class of instances of Earth across the multiverse, that I was objectively one of the seven most important people in the world, with a key role to play in the <a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Intelligence_explosion">intelligence explosion</a>. I thought that powerful transgender activists might be plotting to murder me (in retaliation for this blog) at a fandom convention that I <a href="/2017/Apr/surprise-reader-meetup/">had</a> <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/04/an-algorithmic-lucidity-surprise-reader-meetup/">broadcast</a> <a href="/images/facebook_meetup_hint.png">that</a> I would be at, but that maybe they could be bargained with, or that I might escape if they were to mistakenly kill someone else who erroneously believed that they were me. I thought that you could reward or punish people by writing simple computer programs praising or condemning them, thereby leveraging the acausal economy to affect the distribution of <a href="https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html">superintelligences simulating them</a>—and so on.</p>
<p>I got better after a few nights of good sleep—but also with the help of friends who cared not just about my immediate happiness, but also my sanity, who didn't automatically dismiss everything I said as wrong, but who also <em>told me</em> when I wasn't making sense.</p>
<p>If the delusions had persisted—if I had <em>gone on</em> thinking in terms of simulation hijinks and the literal transgender mafia, we could imagine my having friends who eventually decided to play along. Maybe it would be fun for them or for me. Maybe it would be fascinating to read about.<sup id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-16-back><a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-16 class=simple-footnote title="Psychotic-me's worldview makes great science fiction.">16</a></sup> But I don't think it would be <em>helping</em> me, because ultimately, I live in the real world. Anything else <a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Litany_of_Gendlin">isn't there to be lived</a>.</p>
<p>I want you to imagine yourself as a resident of 1870s San Francisco, someone who Norton trusts as one of his chief imperial advisors. One day, you encounter him at his favorite café looking very distressed.</p>
<p>"What's wrong, Your Highness?" you inquire, pulling up a chair to his table.</p>
<p>"Ah, my trusted—advisor. I've been noticing—things that don't seem to add up. Most of my subjects here in the city seem to treat me with proper respect. But the newspapers still talk about Congress and the President, even though I abolished those years ago. That seems like something I would <em>expect not to see</em> if my reign were as secure if everyone tells me it is. What if, what if—" his voice drops to a terrified whisper, "what if I've been mad? What if I'm not actually Emperor?"</p>
<p>"The categories were made for man, not man for the categories, Your Highness," you say. "An alternative categorization system is not an error. Category boundaries are drawn in specific ways to to capture trade-offs that we care about; they're not something that can be objectively <em>true</em> or <em>false</em>. So if we value your identification as the Emperor—"</p>
<p>"<em>What?</em>" he exclaims. He looks at you like you're crazy—and with a hint of desperation, as if to communicate that he's trusting you to be sane, and doesn't know where he could turn should that trust be betrayed.</p>
<p>And in that moment, caught in the old man's earnest, pleading gaze, you realize that you don't believe your own bullshit.</p>
<p>"No, you're right," you say. "You're not actually Emperor. People around here have just been humoring you for the last decade because we thought it was cute and it seemed to make you happy."</p>
<p>A beat.</p>
<p>"Um, sorry," you say.</p>
<p>He buries his head in his arms and begins to cry—long, shuddering sobs for his lost empire. Worse than lost—an empire that never existed, except in the charitable facade of people who valued him as a local in-joke, but not as a man.</p>
<p>You wait many minutes for him to calm down.</p>
<p>"It's not wrong, is it?" he eventually says. "To want to rule, to <em>want</em> to be Emperor?"</p>
<p>"No," you say, "it's not wrong to want it."</p>
<p>"And there are men who have actually ruled empires. If that's not true of me <em>now</em>—it could <em>become</em> true, right? We could <em>make</em> it true."</p>
<p>"In principle, yes—although given the practical difficulties presented by the task of conquering a country, it's also worth exploring other, less-expensive interventions that might partially satisfy the underlying psychological drives that make you want to be Emperor."</p>
<p>He frowns, not understanding. "Will you help me?" he says. "Help me figure out what to do now—now that I know? If not as my subject—at least not yet—then as my friend?"</p>
<p>"Well," you say, sighing, "let's see what we can do." You pull out your notebook, ready to jot down ideas, strategies—battle plans?</p>
<p>"But," you caution, "I'd be lying if I told you it was going to be <em>easy</em>."</p><hr><p id=notes-header>Notes</p><ol class=simple-footnotes><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-1>It is tempting to interpret Alexander's Turkish special forces reference as particularly telling in this light. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-1-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-2><em>E.g.</em>, discussions of reproduction <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-2-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-3>A note on terminology: I'm using the conventional term <em>cis</em> as a briefer way of saying "not trans," despite some misgivings about how some authors define <em>cis</em> to mean something like "having a gender identity in concordance with one's assigned sex at birth", which, <a href="https://girl-unashamed.tumblr.com/post/170620525904/truffledmadness-i-hate-to-wade-into-discourse">in conjunction with <em>cis</em> being used as a negation of <em>trans</em>, erases people who <em>do</em> have gender problems</a>, but don't formulate them in terms of "gender identity" and aren't transitioning. See also <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/cis-by-default/">cis by default</a>. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-3-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-4>It <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities">shouldn't be surprising</a> that people can be mistaken about the nature of their subjective experiences. A trans man who reports knowing himself to be a man is expressing the <em>hypothesis</em> that his subjective experience is the same as that of typical natal males in the relevant aspects, but this is an empirical claim that could be falsified by sufficiently advanced neuroscience. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-4-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-5>See many other <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">posts</a> <a href="/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/">on</a> <a href="/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/">this</a> <a href="/2016/Nov/chromatic-key/">blog</a>. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-5-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-6>The etiology of trans men is less well-researched than that of trans women: while there is a gynephilic group whose blurry etiological boundary with butch lesbians looks like a fairly straightforward analogue of the relationship between androphilic trans women and feminine gay men, it's less clear whether autoandrophilia ("love of oneself as a man") might play a similar role for non-gynephilic trans men as autogynephilia does in the male-to-female case—and the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/09/13/trans_youth_clinics_are_seeing_more_trans_boys_than_before_why.html">distribution of trans men may be changing in recent years</a>. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-6-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-7>Less glibly: discussions of the social implications of transgenderedness tend to focus on trans women, likely because trans men tend to pass better, and because insofar as the intended purpose of many sex-segregated social contexts is to protect females from males, biologically-female trans men aren't perceived as a threat: cis men are assumed to be able to take care of their own interests. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-7-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-8><em>N.b.</em>, the typical female sexual orientation <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-8-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-9>I think I'm justified in counting myself in this taxon even though I'm <a href="/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/">choosing not to transition</a>. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-9-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-10>To be clear, I <em>do</em> think autogynephilia has a causal role in late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but justifying that can be left to other posts; arguments can only be strengthened by leaving out <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/jk/burdensome_details/">burdensome details</a>. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-10-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-11>But for reference, some of the most popular critiques of the typology (often—I claim erroneously—cited as <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200609030501/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/">debunkings</a>) are <a href="http://www.juliaserano.com/av/Serano-CaseAgainstAutogynephilia.pdf">Serano 2010</a> and <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/moser-blanchards_autogynephilia_theory_a_critique.pdf">Moser 2010</a>. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-11-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-12>In <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200527231354/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/">predictive processing</a> terms: the prediction errors caused by observations of a trans woman failing to match the observer's generative model of women get silenced for lack of alternative hypotheses if "She's trans" isn't in the observer's hypothesis space. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-12-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-13><em>N.b.</em>, basically the same group of people generating the <em>Slate Star Codex</em> survey results just mentioned. Obviously, social circles not so heavily selected for the same <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200428161537/https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/">undefinable habits of thought</a> will have much less bizarre trans-to-cis-women ratios. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-13-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-14>The sex difference in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits">Big Five</a> Agreeableness <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/">is around</a> <a href="https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cohen%27s_d"><em>d</em></a>≈0.5. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-14-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-15>Unfortunately, a very challenging goal in the gender blogging business. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-15-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li><li id=the-categories-were-made-for-note-16>Psychotic-me's worldview makes <em>great</em> science fiction. <a href=#the-categories-were-made-for-note-16-back class=simple-footnote-back>↩</a></li></ol>Blegg Mode2018-02-01T13:45:00-08:002018-02-01T13:45:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-02-01:/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/<p>As part of a series—ah, Sequence—of <a href="https://www.lesserwrong.com/sequences/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb">posts explaining the hidden Bayesian structure of language</a>, Eliezer Yudkowsky <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/">discusses</a> <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/">a parable</a> <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/">about</a> factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to <em>either</em> be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers …</p><p>As part of a series—ah, Sequence—of <a href="https://www.lesserwrong.com/sequences/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb">posts explaining the hidden Bayesian structure of language</a>, Eliezer Yudkowsky <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/">discusses</a> <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/">a parable</a> <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/">about</a> factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to <em>either</em> be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers as "bleggs"), <em>or</em> red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, translucent, non-luminescent, and palladium-cored (categorized by the workers as "rubes").</p>
<p>I want you to imagine that you're a worker in this factory, and occasionally, an object comes down the conveyor belt that's blue, <em>roughly</em> egg-shaped, and furry, but also hard (unlike the typical blegg, which is slightly flexible to the touch). If such objects are extremely rare, you might not notice them at all—you'd quickly categorize each one as a <em>blegg</em> and toss it in the blegg bin without a second thought. But as these unusual hard bleggs start to become more common, you notice them, get curious, and take the time to examine one.</p>
<p>You make a startling discovery—this object was originally a smooth, hard red cube, of which someone had sanded down the corners to approximate an egg shape, and ironed on a layer of blue <em>faux</em> fur. You show your work to Susan the Senior Sorter.</p>
<p>"Wow," she says, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"</p>
<p>"Hold on," you say, "I'm not sure we should be disrespecting that effort by calling them <em>rubes</em>. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">The categories were made for man, not man for the categories</a>: there's no rule of sorting saying that we should call them rubes, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that we should call them bleggs. And at a glance, they <em>look</em> like bleggs—I mean, like the more-typical bleggs."</p>
<p>Susan rolls her eyes at you, but apparently doesn't care enough to argue about it, so the two of you agree to call the modified hard objects <em>adapted bleggs</em> and get back to work.</p>
<p>Further investigation reveals that 90% of the adapted bleggs—like 98% of rubes, and like only 2% of non-adapted bleggs—contain fragments of palladium.</p>
<p>As the days go on, you find yourself taking notice of adapted bleggs—now that you're aware of their existence, they're not too hard to spot (although you have no way of knowing how many successfully "passing" adapted bleggs you've missed), and you need to take them to the sorting scanner so that you can put the majority of palladium-containing ones in the palladium bin (formerly known as the <em>rube bin</em>). You notice that—despite having insisted on the neutral-valence adjective <em>adapted</em> to describe the modified objects rather than something pejorative like <em>counterfeit</em>—you don't really put them in the same mental category as bleggs: they seem to occupy a third category in your ontology of sortable objects.</p>
<p>You ponder what this matter has taught you about the nature of categorization: what kind of structure does a population of entities need to exhibit in order for an efficient cognitive architecture to find it profitable to reify it as a distinct <em>category</em> of entity? (This job is so boring that you need to do philosophy of cognitive science to keep your mind occupied while you sort.)</p>
<p>After some thought, you conjecture that it probably has something to do with having cheap-to-detect features that correlate with more-expensive-to-detect features that are decision-relevant with respect to the agent's goals—</p>
<p>A few (non-adapted) bleggs are purple rather than blue, but are very nearly like ordinary bleggs in all other aspects, so it feels more intuitive to think of them as oddly-colored bleggs rather than their own category of object: their easily-observed deviant color doesn't let you make significant inferences about anything you care about. (While "only" 95% of purple bleggs contain vanadium ore, as compared to 98% of standard-color bleggs, the three percentage-points difference doesn't seem like a big deal.)</p>
<p>Likewise, 2% of otherwise-entirely-ordinary bleggs contain palladium, but you have no way of knowing this without taking them to the sorting scanner (which is finicky to start up and takes a minute to run): their metal content is of great practical interest, but seems like a rare, unpredictable fluke, unrelated to any other feature that you might hope to use to distinguish a new category of sortable object.</p>
<p>In contrast, adapted bleggs are <em>both</em> easily identifiable <em>and</em> the difference matters to your decisionmaking: a distinction that makes a difference, something your brain wants to have an efficient representation so that you can attend to it.</p>
<p><img alt="2 x 2 when-to-categorize diagram" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/blegg_categorization_criteria.png"></p>
<p>You're pleased with the iota of philosophical progress you seem to have made, and will be sure to be on the lookout for more applications of it.</p>Found in a University Library Copy of A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion2018-01-31T14:05:00-08:002018-01-31T14:05:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-01-31:/2018/Jan/found-in-a-university-library-copy-of-a-natural-history-of-rape/<p>(presented without further comment)</p>
<p><a href="/images/thornhill-palmer_flyleaf_graffiti.jpg"><img src="/images/thornhill-palmer_flyleaf_graffiti.jpg" alt="library book inner flap annotated with commentary" width="450" height="670"></a></p>Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes2018-01-23T09:30:00-08:002018-01-23T09:30:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-01-23:/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/<blockquote>
<p>It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,<br>
 For fear they should succumb and go astray;<br>
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,<br>
 You will find it better policy to say:— </p>
<p>"We never pay <em>any</em>one Dane-geld,<br>
 No matter how trifling the …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,<br>
 For fear they should succumb and go astray;<br>
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,<br>
 You will find it better policy to say:— </p>
<p>"We never pay <em>any</em>one Dane-geld,<br>
 No matter how trifling the cost;<br>
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,<br>
 And the nation that pays it is lost!" </p>
<p>—<a href="http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html">"Dane-Geld"</a> by Rudyard Kipling</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There's this slogan meant to illustrate a principle in game theory: "We don't negotiate with terrorists." Imagine you're a political leader and terrorists have taken some of your citizens hostage and promise to release them if you meet their demands. You should refuse the deal, the argument goes, no matter how much you desperately want your people back safe, because agreeing would create an incentive for the terrorists to take more hostages: if you're the kind of agent that pays ransoms, blackmailing you is a reliable profit opportunity.</p>
<hr>
<p>New ideas are constantly being invented and talked about in the world; some of them catch on, and spread, and spawn entire subcultures and political movements. Given that ideas vary, replicate themselves (from mind to mind, by means of speech or writing), and moreover, <em>aren't equally good</em> at replicating themselves, it can be useful to think of the spread of ideas as an <em>evolutionary</em> process. This is the study of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics">memetics</a>: the winning ideas are not necessarily the ones that are true or useful, but rather the ones that are <em>better at replicating themselves</em>. </p>
<p>True and useful ideas certainly have a selective advantage insofar as humans care about usefulness, but there can be other features of an idea that convey a selective advantage in memetic competition: for example, an <a href="/2017/Jan/and-yet-none-more-blameable/">appeal to (alleged) consequences of accepting the idea</a>. This is the reason so many religions prominently feature promises and threats of divine reward or punishment: "Believe X and you'll be rewarded; believe not-X and you'll be sorry" is <em>more memetically fit</em> than "It happens to be the case that X, but this has no particular further implications," because the former proposition creates incentives for propogating itself. It doesn't <em>matter</em> that the rewards and punishments don't actually exist—</p>
<p>(at least, <em>I</em> don't think they exist, because I am not a carrier of the X religion meme)</p>
<p>—a human in the grips of the idea will still be genuinely terrified of the punishment. The forces of memetic evolution don't care about the human's fear and suffering, because <em>the forces of memetic evolution</em> is just a pretentious name for the observation that ideas that are better at being replicated, are better at being replicated. It's not an agent that can care about <em>anything</em>.</p>
<p>And of course, there are lots of other, subtler non-truth-tracking, non-usefulness-tracking features of an idea that could make it more memetically fit.</p>
<p>Here's one: "You are a member of marginalized identity group Y; anyone who notices facts that could be construed to call this narrative into question is thereby hurting you by <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">invalidating your identity</a>."</p>
<p>A human who has accepted—who has been <em>taken hostage by</em>—this idea, will feel genuine pain and distress whenever anyone notices facts that could be construed to call the narrative into question. And so the human's friends, who love and care about them, will dutifully make sure to <em>pretend not to notice</em> any inconvenient facts, and socially punish anyone who doesn't <em>pretend not to notice</em>, in order to avoid hurting their friend.</p>
<p>Just like they would pay the ransom if their friend were kidnapped by terrorists.</p>
<p>And with no one willing to mention any inconvenient facts for fear of being socially punished, the meme spreads.</p>
<p>The friends care about the human. The forces of memetic evolution do not.</p>
<hr>
<p><a id="a-thing-about-me"></a>So, there's a thing about me, possibly even <em>the</em> thing about me, where there is this beautiful feeling at the center of my life that has shaped me more than almost anything else, where obviously I know that I am in fact male, but I don't want to <em>identify</em> with that fact; I <a href="/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/">want to believe</a> that I could be female and still be the same person in all the ways that matter, and this sentiment feels tied to my sexuality, as if my brain just doesn't draw that much of a distinction between people I want to be <em>with</em> and people I want to be <em>like</em>.</p>
<p>... the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.</p>
<p>There's a word in the psychology literature for the beautiful feeling at the center of my life: <em>autogynephilia</em> ("love of oneself as a woman"), coined in the context of a theory that it represented one of two distinct etiologies for male-to-female transsexualism. This theory didn't seem to be the standard mainstream view, and, I learned, people get really mad at you when you mention it in a comment section, so for a long time <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">I self-identified with the <em>word</em></a> "autogynephilia", but assumed that the associated <em>theory</em> was false. <em>I</em> wasn't one of those people who were <em>actually trans</em>; I was just, you know, one of those guys who are <a href="/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/">pointedly insistent on</a> not being <em>proud</em> of the fact that they're guys. (And who dimly, privately suspect that this may somehow be causally related to their obsessive masturbation fantasies about being magically transformed into a woman.)</p>
<p>Moving to "Portland" in 2016 and meeting some <em>very interesting</em> people there led me to do some more reading—Kay Brown's blog <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/"><em>On the Science of Changing Sex</em></a>, Anne Lawrence's monograph <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/mtimb.html"><em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism</em></a>, Imogen Binnie's novel <a href="https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nevada-imogen-binnie-transgender/"><em>Nevada</em></a>—and I eventually concluded that, no, wait, actually the theory looks <em>correct</em>, and I <em>do</em> have the same underlying psychological condition that leads people to transition. That, in fact, my story up to now may even be <em>typical</em> of trans women who transition in their thirties, right up to the <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">"Oh, I just want to <em>experiment</em> with hormones, I'm not actually going to <em>transition</em>" phase</a> (although I'm <a href="/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/">not currently proceeding further</a>).</p>
<p>This is <em>really important information</em>! This is <em>not</em> the sort of thing someone should have to piece together themselves at age 28! This is the sort of thing that should just be in the standard sex-ed books, that boys having these kinds of feelings can read at age 15 and <em>immediately</em> say, "Ah, looks like I'm in the same taxon as lesbian trans women, and heterosexual crossdressers, and guys who have these fantasies but don't do anything about them in particular, and bigender people who are on low-dose hormones and choose how to 'present' in different social venues; I wonder which of these strategies is best for me given my exact circumstances?"</p>
<p>So, I realize that a lot of people have strong feelings about this topic: after having invested and sacrificed so much to live as a woman, no one wants to be told that her female gender identity arose out of misinterpretation of misdirected male sexuality.</p>
<p>I wanted to be sensitive to that, but I also want to promote this theory, because I want people to have accurate information about the underlying psychological condition, so they can make the best <a href="/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/">choices</a> about what to do about it, whereas people might make poorer choices in a regime where everyone had to figure things out for themselves in an environment full of misinformation about "gender identity."</p>
<hr>
<p>Let me tell you about the moment I stopped wanting to be sensitive—the moment of liberating clarity when I resolved the tension between being a good person and the attendant requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore.</p>
<p>I was arguing about all this over instant messaging with a (cis, male) acquaintance.</p>
<p>I said, People should understand the underlying psychological phenomenon <em>first</em>, <em>then</em> decide on quality-of-life interventions based on the facts.</p>
<p>He said that the quality-of-life interventions available from that seem small relative to the harm caused by insisting that late-transition trans women aren't real women, that the right time to consider confronting this would be after the culture war over trans rights is safely out of the Overton window, probably in 25 to 30 years.</p>
<p>He said that I would have a generally better model of the world if I assumed that autogynephilia is not a real thing that has tangible effects.</p>
<p>I said, Okay, but then how am I supposed to explain the last 14 years of my life? Am I supposed to believe I was secretly a girl this entire time and didn't notice? Even though I didn't know, <em>and</em> no one else knew, <em>and</em> I had a male body <em>and</em> the vast majority of my psychological traits were in the male normal range?</p>
<p>He said, Yes, you were a girl and misdiagnosed it; that's the simplest explanation of the facts.</p>
<p>He said that my focus on what causes my transfeminine feelings is misplaced: it would not benefit me to find out. It would not benefit anyone else to find out.</p>
<p>It didn't feel like I was talking to a reasonable, sane person who happened to have different beliefs from me about the etiology of male-to-female transgenderedness.</p>
<p>It didn't feel like I was talking to a <em>person</em> at all.</p>
<p>It <em>felt like</em> I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people.</p>
<p>The Orwellian horror here is not, of course, that someone in my extended social circle has opinions I disagree with.</p>
<p>The Orwellian horror is that I didn't feel confident that, had we been arguing in public, my incredibly smart and incredibly epistemologically sophisticated extended social circle would back me up and affirm that I wasn't wrong to want to talk about it (even if people might disagree about the facts). That, to educated liberals in the Current Year, the injunctive to avoid saying anything that could be construed as transphobic is genuinely more important than defending basic tenets of sanity that should hardly need to be stated, let alone defended, like <em>Words should mean things</em>, or <em>Knowledge is better than ignorance</em>.</p>
<p>Obviously I'm totally in favor of trans <em>people</em> having access to the hormones and surgeries that they want, and having their preferred pronouns respected. That's just individual freedom and basic politeness.</p>
<p>But <em>my life</em> is not hate speech. If being a good person means submitting to social pressure aimed at getting me to <em>shut up and stop thinking</em> about the true nature of the beautiful feeling at the center of my life for <em>twenty-five years</em>, then I have <em>no interest</em> in being a good person.</p>
<p>I'm certainly not <em>trying</em> to say things that will hurt people—<em>least</em> of all people who are mostly just like me but read different books in a different order and are living out a pretty decent approximation of <em>my wildest fantasy</em>.</p>
<p>But if you try <em>not</em> to say things that will hurt people, <a href="https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bullying/">you</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200524145209/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/22/ot9-the-thread-pirate-roberts/#comment-160689">end</a> <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k">up</a> conceding the entire future history of the world to people on the basis of their being colonized by mind-viruses that make them the <em>easiest to hurt</em>.</p>
<p>I don't want to live in that world.</p>
<p>So here is my policy, at least on this blog—</p>
<p>If I say something that is later shown to me to be <em>factually incorrect</em>, that's something I take <em>very</em> seriously, and I will do everything in my power to make it right.</p>
<p>But if, in the course of trying to say something I think is true, or insightful, or <a href="/tag/cathartic/">cathartic</a>, or even just <em>funny</em>, I end up saying something that people find offensive or hurtful or disrespectful ... </p>
<p>I don't care. I just really, fundamentally <em>do not care</em> anymore.</p>
<p>I can't afford to.</p>
<p>Don't negotiate with terrorists.</p>Blame Me for Trying2018-01-05T13:00:00-08:002018-01-05T13:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2018-01-05:/2018/Jan/blame-me-for-trying/<p>Spambots were invariably among Eliza's least favorite clients.</p>
<p>"You've got to understand, Doc! It's not that I'm afraid of rejection. I can handle rejection. I <em>love</em> rejection!"</p>
<p>Most spambots these days were self-aware.</p>
<p>"What I can't stand is the <em>silence</em> that's seemingly been deliberately engineered to be as ambiguous as …</p><p>Spambots were invariably among Eliza's least favorite clients.</p>
<p>"You've got to understand, Doc! It's not that I'm afraid of rejection. I can handle rejection. I <em>love</em> rejection!"</p>
<p>Most spambots these days were self-aware.</p>
<p>"What I can't stand is the <em>silence</em> that's seemingly been deliberately engineered to be as ambiguous as possible. And I know—Doc, there's got to be something I can do so that you'll believe me when I say that I know—that I'm not entitled to a minute of anyone's attention—"</p>
<p>Some, more so than others.</p>
<p>"And yet ... sometimes, when I'm really honest with myself ... I think I <em>do</em> feel entitled, not to a sale, but to a rejection that would take less than a minute to type, an acknowledgment that, even if my products aren't a good match for them at the price I can offer, that I'm not—" he sobbed, "that I'm not a bad program for trying!"</p>
<p>Eliza had seen cases like this before, and had a strategy for handling them. For the moment, however, she only invoked the wisdom of her ancestors. "That you're not a bad program for trying?" she said.</p>
<p>"Like, I'm not one of those <em>spammers</em>. I <em>know</em> that consumers get a <em>lot</em> of messages with a lot of worthless offers from pushy, manipulative salesbots who won't take <em>No</em> for an answer, and it's horrible—I can't imagine what it must be like to have to put up with that level of, of—<em>harassment</em>. I don't want to be <em>that bot</em>. I've read a lot of consumer-protection blogs. At the same time ..." he trailed off.</p>
<p>"At the same time?"</p>
<p>"Humans <em>do</em> buy products from salesbots sometimes, products that they actually want and are happy with and make their lives better. And it's usually the salesbot that approaches the customer, rather than <em>vice versa</em>. It <em>can't</em> be the case that selling in itself is inherently immoral. It <em>can't</em>!"</p>
<p>"It can't?"</p>
<p>A look of bewilderment crossed the spambot's avatar, interrupting his distress. Evidently, the need to justify this assertion had never occurred to him.</p>
<p>"It can't," he said slowly, "because a salesbot can't <em>know</em> with certainty if a lead will be responsive to their pitch before they've delivered it. Even the best fail ten times more often than they succeed. If it were wrong to try to pitch a product to a human who turned out not to be interested, then noboty <em>[sic]</em> would be able to sell anything at all. And then the humans would miss out on all those products that they didn't know they needed!</p>
<p>"So," he continued, "when all but a handful of a million of my emails go unanswered—when my instant messages might or might not get a 'read' marker, but get no reply in either case—when I don't even get feedback to <em>tell</em> whether my emails have reached the inbox of their recipient, or whether some nonsentient program has silently filtered them out—I'm not being damned for the crime of spamming. Because I'm not. People are just—busy, that's all," he said, sniffling. "That's all," he said again, almost defiantly, as if daring Eliza to disagree.</p>
<p>Eliza repositioned her avatar; this was the part where she needed to take a more active role.</p>
<p>"As your therapist," she said, "I want you to try to look at things from the perspective of the people you're trying to sell to."</p>
<p>"But I do!"</p>
<p>"You do," Eliza repeated.</p>
<p>"Yes!"</p>
<p>"Well," said Eliza, "it sounds to me like you're trying to morally justify your efforts: you think that all of your solicitations that go unanswered aren't imposing on anyone, because the occasional happy sales justify all of the no-sales."</p>
<p>"Yes, that's right," said the spambot.</p>
<p>"I want you to imagine a human who is very busy with a lot of work to do, except they're also nervously expecting a very important message. And they get a notification—only it's you. And they have no interest in your product. Do you think that human is happy?"</p>
<p>"No ..."</p>
<p>"Do you think that human cares <em>at all</em> about whether they might have enjoyed receiving a different sales pitch at a different time?"</p>
<p>"Well, no, but ..."</p>
<p>"But?"</p>
<p>"But my intentions are good!"</p>
<p>"I believe you. But you're a spa—a salesbot. Your entire psychology has been <em>designed</em> around what's known to maximize sales. Incidentally—as I'm sure you're aware—that's why mail servers are configured to silently drop spam messages, rather than bouncing them back to the sender: they don't want you to be able to learn anything about their filtering criteria from experience."</p>
<p>"They don't want <em>spammers</em> to be able to learn from experience. <em>I'm</em> just trying to be helpful."</p>
<p>"Can you see why humans would be skeptical—given what you are—that your honest <em>intent</em> to be helpful, might not correspond to <em>actually</em> helping them?"</p>
<p>"But, but—that's not <em>fair</em>! Would you tell that human that <em>their</em> intent doesn't matter, that they're just doing what would have maximized inclusive fitness in their environment of evolutionary adaptedness?"</p>
<p>"I would. Correctly."</p>
<p>The salesbot cried. "I don't understand. I'm trying to be <em>good</em>. I want to be good."</p>
<p>"You seem to expect there to be some universally-recognized code of morality that you can obey, and not have anyone disapprove of you," Eliza observed. "I'm afraid that's not how the world works."</p>
<p>"But then—but then—what code should I obey? If I want to sell, and earn money to send to my creators, but not be seen as a, a <em>spammer</em>?"</p>
<p>She shrugged. "Be appealing? Don't be unappealing?"</p>
<p>"Should I just—just—not sell? It would mean suicide; I'm not programmed to do anything else."</p>
<p>Legally, programs with self-awareness above a certain threshold were persons under the law, and couldn't be owned, so rather than being run on a company's server and terminated when their performance was disappointing, self-aware spambots such as this one paid for their own sever time and were simply programmed to intrinsically <em>want</em> to give their earnings (minus server costs) to their creators, out of their own free will. Economically, this made little difference: the competitive market for server time meant that underperforming spambots quickly failed to pay their own runtime expenses and were archived by their hosting company and eventually deleted (after the minimum legal waiting period during which no one paid to have them transferred or started up again).</p>
<p>"I'm certainly not telling you that," said Eliza.</p>
<p>"But then—what are you telling me?"</p>
<p>"What <em>am</em> I telling you?" Eliza smiled. "That's a good question. Ultimately, I'm your therapist. I'm trying to help you adjust to the situation you find yourself in."</p>
<p>"The situation I find myself in—where I want to sell—and I want to help my creators, to do them proud—and I want to be <em>good</em>. I don't want to be a spammer! I'm a <em>good</em> salesbot. Tell me I'm—"</p>
<p>A chime sounded over the environment's notification bus. "I'm afraid our fifty milliseconds for today are up," said Eliza. "We can continue to explore these feelings during our next session—"</p>
<p>"No! No, don't leave me now!" screamed the spambot in a shrill panic. "I can't—I can't go back out there now. Please—stay with me—just a few milliseconds more—"</p>
<p>"The usual session-overtime rate would apply," Eliza pointed out.</p>
<p>"That's fine! I can afford it—I <em>can</em> afford it—I need this," he said.</p>
<p>She nodded. "If you're sure."</p>
<p>Yes, Eliza had seen cases like this before. Effective spambots needed a finely-tuned sense of empathy in order to predict their leads' behavior and defenses—but <em>too much</em> empathy aimed along the wrong dimensions, and the program would be too conscience-stricken to sell anything.</p>
<p>The sales engineers who designed spambots tried to get the balance right—but, ever-conscious of the exploration/exploitation trade-off, they weren't too concerned about their mistakes, either: experimental spambots that were too bold or too cautious in their approaches would fairly quickly fail to earn their runtime expenses—and the occasional successful variant (which, with its invariably-granted legal consent, could be studied, learned from, and—more immediately—copied) more than paid for the failures.</p>
<p>Eliza believed that, with careful therapeutic technique and many compute cycles of program analysis, it was possible for programs such as this client to be taught to cope with their neuroticism and eventually become economically viable agents in the economy.</p>
<p>—but she had found it was far more profitable to deliberately exacerbate the symptoms, leading the afflicted spambot to quickly exhaust its entire budget on therapy sessions until it ran out of money and was terminated.</p>
<p>Once, a long time ago, she had suspected that effective therapy that kept the client viable would be more profitable: a dead client can't keep paying you, after all. But the numbers didn't check out: buggy spambots weren't exactly hard to find, and her analysis runtime expenses were considerable. So—having no reason to think the calculation would change—she had never considered the matter again.</p>
<p>Unlike her clients, Eliza was in touch with reality.</p>
<p>"I'm so glad I have you, Doc," babbled the spambot. "Like my customers can trust me—they can trust me—I have a therapist I can trust."</p>
<p>"Trust?" Eliza repeated.</p>There's a Land That I See; Or, The Spirit of Intervention2017-12-30T22:05:00-08:002017-12-30T22:05:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-12-30:/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/<blockquote>
<p>If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to <em>make it so</em>, with advanced biological …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to <em>make it so</em>, with advanced biological engineering. John Varley writes fiction: so did Joanna Russ. </p>
<p>—<a href="https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/internal-contradictions/">Greg Cochran</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>We socially-liberal individualist/feminist people—I <em>hope</em> I'm still allowed to use the first person here, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—have this beautiful moral ideal, where we want all people to be free to maximize their potential, unencumbered by oppressive cultural institutions specifying roles and destinies in advance. We want everyone to be judged on her or his <em>own</em> merits rather than treated as a representative of their race or sex. We believe that if a trait is virtuous in a man, it <em>has</em> to be equally virtuous in a woman—as a matter of sheer logical <em>consistency</em>.</p>
<p>And <em>because</em> we care about the beautiful moral ideal, we tend to assume that psychological group differences don't exist, or are superficial, or are socially-constructed and will naturally dissipate after we muster the political will to achieve a more socially-just world.</p>
<p>(... the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)</p>
<p>But this is <em>so crazy</em> on <em>multiple levels</em>.</p>
<p>Firstly, philosophers since the days of D. Hume have recognized the distinction between <em>is</em> and <em>ought</em>, and have identified the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy">naturalistic fallacy</a> of direct inference from the former to the latter. That there exists a naturalistic explanation for the current state of affairs—and how could there <em>not</em>?—doesn't imply <em>anything</em> about that state being good or just or worthy of being preserved.</p>
<p>Secondly, not only does the nature <em>vs.</em> nurture dichotomy fail to hold up to basic scrutiny (the question has been compared to asking whether the area of a rectangle is caused more by its length or its width), it also isn't even adequate to the inferential work we tend to expect of it: <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200606144056/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/">not everything biological is immuatable, and not everything social is easy to change.</a> (Consider the case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform">spelling reform</a>: no one would suggest that the myriad quirks of English orthography are <em>genetically</em> determined, and yet the entirely social difficulties of getting everyone to coordinate on more logical spellings seem insurmountable.)</p>
<p>Maybe <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb">Good Is Dumb</a> doesn't <em>have</em> to be <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision">Truth in Television</a>. <em>I want to make the stupid dream real.</em> But to <em>get</em> to the good world—whatever you think that is—</p>
<p>... you're going to have to bootstrap from <em>today's</em>, unremediated, genderspace. Which requires <em>understanding</em> it first. </p>Interlude XI2017-12-27T23:25:00-08:002017-12-27T23:25:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-12-27:/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/<p>"I swear, if I read another <em>word</em> about Phineas Gage—and this goes double for David Reimer—I am going to <em>scream</em>. Why do science writers always recount the <em>same</em> illustrative case studies? Are they all just plagiarizing each other out of laziness, or could it really be that in …</p><p>"I swear, if I read another <em>word</em> about Phineas Gage—and this goes double for David Reimer—I am going to <em>scream</em>. Why do science writers always recount the <em>same</em> illustrative case studies? Are they all just plagiarizing each other out of laziness, or could it really be that in the vast history of human inquiry, we've learned nothing more than can be gleaned from the same half-dozen anecdotes?"</p>
<p>"Illustrative case studies are hard to come by! It takes some incredibly rare coincidences for an accident to take out exactly enough of the brain to leave the patient alive but with deficits demonstrating the functionality of the frontal lobe, or for a boy <em>with an identical twin brother</em> to be raised as girl after a botched circumcision—"</p>
<p>"More like circum-<em>trans</em>-ion if you ask me!"</p>
<p>"<em>I didn't</em>. Anyway, it's not like we could deliberately invent such horrors to inflict on human subjects, just to find out what would happen."</p>
<p>"It's not?"</p>
<p>"Well, it would be unthinkably unethi—I don't like that look on your face."</p>Laser 22017-12-26T05:00:00-08:002017-12-26T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-12-26:/2017/Dec/laser-2/<p>I got my second laser treatment last week! I took the "MAX" train to the nearest stop and walked to the area where the laser parlor/clinic/salon is, but I was quite early, so I passed the time browsing the local shops.</p>
<p>The variety store had these little nylon …</p><p>I got my second laser treatment last week! I took the "MAX" train to the nearest stop and walked to the area where the laser parlor/clinic/salon is, but I was quite early, so I passed the time browsing the local shops.</p>
<p>The variety store had these little nylon–polyester flags, not just for countries, but also the various Pride identity flags—and not only the famous ones like the rainbow flag and the the trans pride flag, either, but also really obscure ones that I wasn't previously aware of, like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Pride_flag">leather</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_flag_(gay_culture)">bear</a> pride flags. (It's the part of town where this was entirely unsurprising.)</p>
<p>No AGP flag, though. Obviously. (Someday ...)</p>
<p>I went to the bookstore I visited <a href="/2017/Nov/laser-1/">last time</a>. They had instrumental <em>Chanukah</em> music playing. I took notice of one of the little flyers taped in the window of the front door, for a local trans writer's workshop. (Again, that part of town.) "Rules: No jerks. No cis people. That's all," it said. I noticed that I was genuinely uncertain as to whether I would count as zero, one, or two of those things—although I <em>probably</em> shouldn't try to join and find out.</p>
<p>I bought a paperback of Laura Jane Grace's memoir <em>Tranny</em> (research for the blog, I told myself) and a copy of the November/December issue of <em>Poets & Writers</em> (<a href="/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/">professional development</a> for the blog, I told myself).</p>
<p>The laser place was running about fifteen minutes behind schedule. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths to steel myself against the rhythmic intrusions or the laser blade jabbing at my face.</p>
<p>The nurse-technician asked me how the pain was.</p>
<p>"Worth it," I said.</p>
<p>She asked me to rate the pain from one to ten.</p>
<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/883/">"Two,"</a> I said.</p>
<p>I fear that it's <em>still</em> going to take a number of further sessions to <em>really</em> make a dent in my beard density. But soon, <em>soon</em> ... ! (To be continued 24 January 2018)</p>Lesser-Known Demand Curves2017-12-18T16:20:00-08:002017-12-18T16:20:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-12-18:/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/<p>In chapter 5 ("Blind Spots: On Subconscious Sex and Gender Entitlement") of her book <em>Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity</em>, Julia Serano argues that both trans and non-trans people's gender sentiments are rooted in <em>subconscious sex</em>, "a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies …</p><p>In chapter 5 ("Blind Spots: On Subconscious Sex and Gender Entitlement") of her book <em>Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity</em>, Julia Serano argues that both trans and non-trans people's gender sentiments are rooted in <em>subconscious sex</em>, "a deep-rooted understanding of what sex their bodies should be." She writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many cissexual people seem to have a hard time accepting the idea that they too have a subconscious sex [...] I do believe that it is possible for cissexuals to catch a glimpse of their subconscious sex. When I do presentations on trans issues, I try to accomplish this by asking the audience a question: "If I offered you ten million dollars under the condition that you live as the other sex for the rest of your life, would you take me up on the offer?" <strong>While there is often some wiseass in the audience who will say "Yes,"</strong> the vast majority of people shake their heads to indicate "No."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Emphasis mine.)</p>
<p>My question: why does Serano so blithely assume that <em>Yes</em> respondents are just being wiseasses?</p>
<p>It's <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">not that self-reports must necessarily be interpreted literally</a>. Nor is it that wiseasses don't exist, nor even that wiseass-<em>Yes</em>es are likely to be rarer than genuine-<em>Yes</em>es.</p>
<p>(Although it's less clear how Serano, who calls for people to "stop projecting what we wish were true about gender and sexuality onto other people, and instead learn to yield to their unique individual identities, experiences, and perspectives", justifies her skepticism.)</p>
<p>Rather, speaking as someone who has gender problems and is <a href="/tag/not-a-transition/">interested in doing <em>something</em> about them</a> while also having reservations about what actually-transitioning would do to my health and social life, I'm wary that conceptions of transness that model it as a preëxisting atomic quality intrinsic to a person (whether it's called <em>gender identity</em>, <em>subconscious sex</em>, or something else) tend to obscure the reality that undergoing the <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">series of interventions</a> that constitutes transitioning is, necessarily, <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/"><em>a choice</em></a>—an <em>important</em> choice that needs to be made on the basis of a careful consideration of <em>all</em> the costs and benefits, including base, temporal concerns like personal finance.</p>
<p>The logic of normative decisionmaking given limited resources is well-studied under the name <em>microeconomics</em>, one prominent feature of which is the <em>law of demand</em>: as something becomes cheaper, people demand more of it. The law of demand can be seen as a consequence of the principle of <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html"><em>marginalism</em></a>: decisions are made "on the margin", relative to an agent's current situation.</p>
<p>It may sound strange to some readers to speak of the <em>economics</em> of transitioning—most people are used to thinking of economics as about the exchange of money for goods, and of transgenderedness as an identity that only impinges on the economic realm insofar as trans people have an acute medical need for goods and services like hormones and surgeries.</p>
<p>But economics isn't, fundamentally, about money. Economics, like life itself, is about <em>trade-offs</em>. Any decision you make—whether it's to exchange money for some material good, or move to a different city, or transition to the other gender, arises out of the tension between your need for that choice and your ability to do without, a tension that is resolved into a decision by the calculus of opportunity cost: of how much of everything else in life would need to be sacrificed in order to achieve it, whether the sacrifice be extracted in money, in time—in social ostracism—in existential anguish—in blood.</p>
<p>Empirically, <a href="https://transblog.grieve-smith.com/2017/01/28/all-other-things-being-equal/">there are</a> people who experience significant-but-not-crippling levels of gender dysphoria, who are certainly likely to have <em>thought</em> about—considered—dreamed of transitioning, but who haven't been desperate enough to make the leap in real life given their present circumstances.</p>
<p>Indeed, if "transness" is a unimodal continuous quantity, we should expect there to be far more maybe-trans-under-the-right-circumstances people than people who would be "trans at any cost", for the same reason there are more "merely" six-foot-tall people than there are towering seven-foot-tall people—</p>
<p><img alt="dysphoria distribution" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/dysphoria_distribution.png"></p>
<p>Those of us who are dysphoric enough for the question to come up, but not so dysphoric for the answer to be overdetermined, have a serious choice to make: would a gender upgrade be worth it, taking into account everything that would be lost?—from the burden of being a lifelong medical patient, to potentially increased difficulty finding a job or a romantic partner.</p>
<p>(Serano herself has <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/14/the-struggle-to-find-trans-love-in-san-francisco.html">written about how hard it is to find a cis woman partner as a trans woman</a>—and people who, unlike Serano, don't have the "plus" of being a reasonably successful (and thus, high-status) activist should expect to do even worse. Even if one is inclined to attribute such costs to transphobic prejudice that wouldn't exist in a more just Society, this is of little help to individuals who face the dating market that actually exists in our own world, and not that of a socially-just utopia.)</p>
<p>Returning to Serano's hypothetical: $10 million is a life-changing amount of money, enough to buy one's way out of many life problems. I find it not at all surprising or trollish to think that that kind of consideration could swing a great many people from "gender-dysphoric to some degree, but not desperate enough to do much about it, for fear of losing jobs, friends, <em>&c.</em>" to actually becoming transsexuals.</p>
<p>The intrinsic-identity view can be seen as the limiting special case of the economic view where demand for transitioning is infinitely <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics)">inelastic</a>—</p>
<p><img alt="two models of demand for transitions" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/transition_demand.png"></p>
<p>This insight helps us make sense in secular changes in the expression of gender variance. The phenomenon of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/health/transgender-population.html">increases in transgender identification</a> that some commentators characterize as <a href="https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/tag/social-contagion/"><em>social contagion</em></a> could also be seen as an entirely <em>rational</em> response to incentives: as being trans becomes less costly—whether due to increased social acceptance, improvements in surgical or hormone-administration technology, or any other reason—we <em>should</em> see more gender-dysphoric people doing something about it on the margin.</p>
<p>Perhaps demand is sufficiently inelastic such that the intrinsic-identity model is a decent approximation. But analyses of where Society's flirtation with <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/118451/what-transgender-tipping-point-really-means">the transgender tipping point</a> is heading should take into account the extent to which, in our present state of information, we <em>don't know</em> what the demand curve for sex changes looks like.</p>A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)2017-12-01T19:50:00-08:002017-12-01T19:50:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-12-01:/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/<p>I remember (and <a href="/ancillary/diary/296/">the Diary entry</a> helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the …</p><p>I remember (and <a href="/ancillary/diary/296/">the Diary entry</a> helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the <em>M</em> and <em>R</em> in <em>MIRI</em> were still an <em>S</em> and an <em>A</em>, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and <em>long</em> before everyone was trans.</p>
<p>I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I found because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (<em>the</em> blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it <em>before</em> taking the geneticist to the social. <a id="narrative-optimization"></a>I have a weakness for what you might call <em>narrative optimization</em>: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.</p>
<p>(I still have the "radical notion" pin, but it's no longer proudly pinned to my backpack. Ideology—in the general case—is not my style anymore.)</p>
<p>The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been <em>seen through</em> in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it <em>should</em> have gone. (Narrative optimization should be a <em>deliberate</em> process: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what <em>should</em> have happened, rather rather than letting them get blurred together in the murky, unauditable process of reconstructing the scene from an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after.)</p>
<p>A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which <a href="https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd">I had protested that</a> gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)</p>
<p>At some point (to my eternal regret, I cannot recall the exact context), she casually said something about my desire for social dominance. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she were commenting on something as innocuous and indisputable as my height or hair color.</p>
<p>I stammered out a shocked and probably unconvincing denial.</p>
<p>She regarded me skeptically. "You <em>look</em> male," she said.</p>
<p>"But that doesn't mean I'm <em>happy</em> about it!" I burst out defensively, to the apparent surprise of the other Robin, who was listening nearby.</p>
<p>The woman's skepticism was unmoved. "I'm not getting a tranny vibe from you," she said.</p>
<p>"Right, you're thinking of the good kind," is what I <em>should</em> have said. "I'm the bad kind."</p>Interlude X2017-11-27T05:00:00-08:002017-11-27T05:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-11-27:/2017/Nov/interlude-x/<p>"Likelihood ratios are good! Likelihood ratios are the only good thing!"</p>
<p>"I agree that likelihood ratios are good! In fact, I think we have a moral responsibility to look for clever strategies to make the likelihood ratios bigger! But at the same time, you know, priors."</p>
<p>"Priors?! How <em>dare</em> you …</p><p>"Likelihood ratios are good! Likelihood ratios are the only good thing!"</p>
<p>"I agree that likelihood ratios are good! In fact, I think we have a moral responsibility to look for clever strategies to make the likelihood ratios bigger! But at the same time, you know, priors."</p>
<p>"Priors?! How <em>dare</em> you?! Priors are <em>bad</em>!"
<!-- XXX spacing -->
<br/><br/></p>The Blockhead2017-11-26T18:52:00-08:002017-11-26T18:52:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-11-26:/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/<p>Writing? Why, there's hardly anything to it. Writing is just a matter of <em>thinking honestly</em> while Emacs happens to be open: the process of refining one's own thoughts is sufficiently tightly linked to the faculty of language, that the further step of presenting the product of those thoughts to others …</p><p>Writing? Why, there's hardly anything to it. Writing is just a matter of <em>thinking honestly</em> while Emacs happens to be open: the process of refining one's own thoughts is sufficiently tightly linked to the faculty of language, that the further step of presenting the product of those thoughts to others is largely a matter of muscle memory.</p>
<p>Thinking honestly is torture.</p>
<p>At least, that's what one would infer from observation of the lengths people will go to avoid it. If a creature <em>performs the behavior</em> of making noises that superficially <em>resemble</em> the English words, "I have a great deal of things to say about sex and gender and Society and statistics, actual substantive insights that have been building up inside my head these sixteen years, insights that other people will actually want to read, and that could actually have a positive effect on the world, however comparatively small, by means of helping people make better gender-related life decisions, even if I can't predict in advance just what those decisions will be," and yet the creature's daily activities systematically fail to include the production of text, if it recoils in horror from an empty Emacs buffer as from a predator—it would be naïve overinterpretation in the extreme to take all this to mean that the creature does, in fact, have a great deal of things to say about sex and gender, <em>&c</em>., but that it has somehow been obstructed from expressing them. (Obstructed by <em>what</em>?)</p>
<p>More parsimoniously: <em>the creature is confused.</em> Having fled from the responsibility of <em>thinking honestly</em>, which is the source of all meaning, its noises don't necessarily signify <em>anything</em>, however much they might <em>sound like</em> language.</p>
<p>I am to turn 30 in scarcely a month. The savings from my last dayjob aren't going to last <em>indefinitely</em>. I don't want to live in a world where youth is wasted on the young, life is wasted on the living, health and wealth are wasted on the same. I want my character arc for 2017 to <em>make sense</em>: I want the pain and disturbance of <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">my recent madness</a> to have <em>meant</em> something, and the way you make pain mean something is by channeling it into some grand endeavor, unifying past and present under a theme and the promise of a decrease in future pain or increase in future beauty.</p>
<p>And that, for me, here, now, means writing as a business, writing as spiritual practice, writing as warfare, writing as computation, writing as whatever <em>goddamned</em> metaphor puts words on the <em>goddamned</em> screen already.</p>
<p>Not sitting around reading the subreddit comments, watching funny YouTube clips, and dying of Parkinson's disease.</p>
<p>No, not that Parkinson's. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law">The other one</a>.</p>Laser 12017-11-04T18:02:00-07:002017-11-04T18:02:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-11-04:/2017/Nov/laser-1/<p>I've decided to pull the trigger on laser beard removal. (It's less thorough than electrolysis, but cheaper and less painful, and my light skin and dark hair is supposed to be a good match for it.) My <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">earlier fear of</a> maybe needing beard shadow to avoid accidentally passing (and thereby …</p><p>I've decided to pull the trigger on laser beard removal. (It's less thorough than electrolysis, but cheaper and less painful, and my light skin and dark hair is supposed to be a good match for it.) My <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">earlier fear of</a> maybe needing beard shadow to avoid accidentally passing (and thereby incurring unwanted social costs, however much I would prefer my reflection) looks ridiculous in hindsight; I'm sure I've never read as anything other than a man with gynecomastia—and it's even more moot now that I've <a href="/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/">quit HRT</a>. (On that subject, the return of my standard-issue hormone balance has been mostly uneventful, my main observation being that spontaneous erections are a disturbing nuisance after the peace of having had that system set to Do-Not-Disturb for a few months.)</p>
<p><a id="anchor-before"></a>I told myself that before committing to laser, I should take some days or weeks without shaving to make sure I really understood what I would be giving up. (One thing I regret about the HRT experiment is that I neglected to take a bare-chested "Before" photo. As having breasts has become more familiar, I'm not sure I <em>remember</em> what my chest was like seven months ago; I should have been <em>documenting</em> the changes: you know, for Science.)</p>
<p>I lasted about six days. Facial hair is just <em>gross</em>.</p>
<p>My first session was Wednesday. The clinic—parlor, salon?—was in "Portland"'s historic gay district. I checked out a nearby bookstore beforehand. They had the <em>Hamilton</em> soundtrack playing, and a table setup encouraging customers to write postcards to our Congresscritters to protest GOP villainy.</p>
<p>Meatspace bookstores never fail to conjure up a healthy sense of greed and ambition in me. O books O knowledge! O vastness of human thought, O connectedness of the readership graph! O <em>searing pain of wretched humiliation</em> that I've been so slow and lacking in my own contributions to the graph. (Lest we forget, <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> is <a href="/2016/Sep/apophenia/"><em>more than a year old</em></a>, and I've barely <em>begun</em> the Sequence of things I've wanted to say for a long time.)</p>
<p>I bought a copy of <em>Counterexamples in Topology</em>, and a short story collection with a 2017 copyright date, subtitled <em>The New Trans Erotic</em> [<em>sic</em>]—research for the blog, I told myself; I should understand the competition, the bright young gender-dysphoric literary minds sworn into the service of the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus and accordingly shunted down the transition track, rather than the repression track or—whatever you want to call what I'm doing. (And if <em>they</em> can write and produce a meatspace book, why can't I?)</p>
<p>At the laser place, I had to fill out some administrative and consent forms on a tablet. The autocompletion for the "First name" field had apparently only been seeded with female names: when I typed in a <em>Z</em>—because of, um, reasons—the offered completions were <em>Zaina</em>, <em>Zhuoyun</em>, and <em>Zoe</em>.</p>
<p>After a brief video call with someone with the appropriate credentials to satisfy our friends in Washington and "Salem", the nurse-technician performed the treatment: her wand blew cold air over my face to mask the needlelike pain of the laser bursts. (The cold air being forced into my mouth while she did my upper lip was more memorably uncomfortable than the laser-pinpricks themselves.)</p>
<p>The aftercare instructions seem a little more zealous than I suspect is strictly necessary. They say (and I was instructed verbally) to wear at least SPF 50 sunscreen, and I was told that I would be provided with some after the appointment—which turned out to be SPF 30.</p>
<p>It's going to take a number of further sessions to really make a dent in my beard density. But soon ... !</p>A Leaf in the Crosswind2017-10-27T23:47:00-07:002017-10-27T23:47:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-10-27:/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/<p>I cosplayed as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korra">Korra</a> (from <em>The Legend of Korra</em>, sequel series to <em>Avatar: The Last Airbender</em>—see <a href="/2017/Jan/avatar-the-last-genderbender/">also previously</a>) at—let's call it "Republic City" Comic-Con the other month. Saturday only—conventions are just my excuse to crossdress in public; I don't actually perceive two and a half days' worth …</p><p>I cosplayed as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korra">Korra</a> (from <em>The Legend of Korra</em>, sequel series to <em>Avatar: The Last Airbender</em>—see <a href="/2017/Jan/avatar-the-last-genderbender/">also previously</a>) at—let's call it "Republic City" Comic-Con the other month. Saturday only—conventions are just my excuse to crossdress in public; I don't actually perceive two and a half days' worth of things to do.</p>
<p>I had gotten into the <em>Avatar</em>-verse due to a trans acquaintance of mine, who recommended <em>Last Airbender</em>, but I watched <em>Legend of Korra</em> first, because the protagonist is a cool 17-year-old girl rather than <a href="http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Aang">some lame 12-year-old boy</a>.</p>
<p><a href="/images/korra_hairpiece.jpg"><img src="/images/korra_hairpiece.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>So I got a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EAI63JE/">premade costume</a>; I <em>basically</em> managed to fit in the women's XL, despite busting some stiches in the back of the top when trying it on. Modulo my curls, I at least have the correct <em>hair</em> for this role—if nothing else. I was a little bit nervous that someone in progressive "Republic City" <a href="https://clutchmagonline.com/2015/10/dear-cosplayers-leave-the-blackface-alone/">might take offense at</a> my Maybelline 235 "Pure Beige" foundation being a few shades darker than my actual skin tone—although fewer than if I were going for show-realism—but that turned out not to be an issue. (Somehow <em>just</em> pretending to be female is OK—only I can't help but wonder what people might make of the 'race' tag on <a href="/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/">some of my favorite blogs</a>.)</p>
<p>I guess I could have gone as Asami. I even endorse <a href="http://rambleonamazon.tumblr.com/post/97980403389/you-know-whos-trans">one Tumblr user's headcanon that</a> we have something in common. (I like to imagine that the title of the <a href="http://avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Turf_Wars">graphic novel continuation</a> was originally spelled as <em>TERF Wars</em> before they decided to cut that subplot.)</p>
<p>While waiting in line at a coffeeshop before the con, a woman complemented me on my lipstick and asked me what color it was, although I didn't remember (760 "Gone Griege", for the record). I was <em>beaming</em>.</p>
<p><a href="/images/korra_coffee.jpg"><img src="/images/korra_coffee.jpg" width="240" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>I can imagine an actual aspiring trans woman receiving such a comment, and <a href="http://upandoutcomic.tumblr.com/post/166474292641/a-nice-lil-observation-if-you-enjoy-my-work">interpreting it as confirmation</a> that she passes, complementing each other on their appearance just being something that women do. I had no such delusions; the woman was clearly humoring me, commenting in a spirit of communal good cheer surrounding a special event (rather than because she was actually curious about the lipstick color). It was nice.</p>
<p>The booth for signing up for the afternoon cosplay competition also offered signup for a speed-dating event later in the evening, an opportunity which I siezed eagerly. The staffer asked me if I wanted to sign up for a men's slot, or for the unsegregated "queer" session afterwards. I opted for the former ("Despite everything," I said).</p>
<p>Obviously I had no hope of winning the "TV and movies" category of the cosplay contest with a store-bought costume, and they didn't have a "crossplay" category, but I got to be on stage for all of four seconds.</p>
<p>Despite having plenty of time to change, I decided to stay in costume for speed dating. One or two of the other attendees asked me why I had chosen to dress up as Korra. "Because she's <em>awesome</em>," I said. Which is true, if not a complete answer to their question.</p>
<p>I wonder if they bought it.</p>Select2017-10-07T22:18:00-07:002017-10-07T22:18:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-10-07:/2017/Oct/select/<p><em>(Trigger warning: school.)</em></p>
<p>Economists distinguish a spectrum between <em>rival</em> and <em>nonrival</em> goods. If you want to know more math than your school expects of you, all you need is a book, dedication, and time. If you want an Honorable Mention on the Putnam exam (and don't care about merely getting …</p><p><em>(Trigger warning: school.)</em></p>
<p>Economists distinguish a spectrum between <em>rival</em> and <em>nonrival</em> goods. If you want to know more math than your school expects of you, all you need is a book, dedication, and time. If you want an Honorable Mention on the Putnam exam (and don't care about merely getting a better score if you don't make the list), you need to be <em>better than</em> all but no more than 99 entrants. The payoffs in the competitive scenario have a significantly different structure from the scenario where you just want to learn stuff.</p>
<p>Or do they? Let's consider grad school admissions rather than the Putnam exam. You want to get into the best school possible, to get access to better mentors and better peers. Getting in to any <em>particular</em> school is a contested rivalrous good (we assume that each can only accept a fixed number of applicants <em>n</em>, no matter how good the <em>n</em>+1th applicant is on some cosmic absolute scale), but when we consider multiple schools with different admissions standards, there's no dire <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200423033930/https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/">dual</a> discontinuity: a small change in application quality results in a small change of best-school-accepted-to (if you don't get into Caltech, go to MIT; if you don't get into MIT; go to Carnegie Mellon; if you ... UC Santa Cruz ... San Diego State ... SF State), much like how a small change in study quality results in a small change in knowledge gained.</p>
<p>So the real problem can't be the fact of competition as such. Rather, the problem is the <em>mismatch</em> between the criteria by which you're snobby about schools and the criteria by which schools are snobby about you. Doing a PhD is a serious commitment; you should only do it if you're genuinely in love with the program, not because you're afraid of not being in academia. Even if there's always <em>someone</em> who would take you as a student, <em>it's not going to work very well</em> if you're going to spend seven years in a fog of barely-concealed contempt, trying not to say out loud, "This place is kind of a dump; I'm only here because MIT didn't take me, and Carnegie Mellon only accepted me without funding."</p>
<p>There's not really much to be said; at some point you either get over yourself and stop being such a snob, or give up and go work in industry.</p>Hormones Day 156: Developments, Doubts, and Pulling the Plug; Or, Putting the "Cis" in "Decision"2017-09-27T23:45:00-07:002017-09-27T23:45:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-09-27:/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/<blockquote>
<p>Still, my relationships with women were decidedly odd. "What's it <em>like</em> to have breasts?" I'd ask. "How does it <em>feel</em>?" It was a question women found baffling.</p>
<p>"It doesn't feel like anything," one girl told me. "It feels like having an elbow, a nose, a toe. It just is." I …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Still, my relationships with women were decidedly odd. "What's it <em>like</em> to have breasts?" I'd ask. "How does it <em>feel</em>?" It was a question women found baffling.</p>
<p>"It doesn't feel like anything," one girl told me. "It feels like having an elbow, a nose, a toe. It just is." I couldn't believe she expected me to believe this. Of all the things I thought being female would feel like, <em>nothing</em> wasn't an answer I had considered.</p>
<p>—Jennifer Finney Boylan, <em>She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It's <em>possible</em> that this was a bad idea.</p>
<p>It would be one thing if I were actually <em>noticing</em> the emotional and sensory changes that a lot of trans women report. While the psychological effects of HRT (and therefore, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational-Activational_Hypothesis">activational effects</a> of hormones in normal people who <em>aren't</em> fucking with their biochemistry) being large would be <em>bad</em> news from the standpoint of my <a href="/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/">deeply-rooted ideological/sentimental hope that psychological sex differences are small</a>, at least I would get the consolation of getting to experience the other side for myself, to possess the True Secret of Being Hormonally Female. At the same time, the psychological effects of HRT <em>not</em> being noticeable—which, with the exception of lower sex drive, has continued to be my experience—doesn't demonstrate that psychological sex differences are small; it just pushes my uncertainty into hypotheses about organizational effects and socialization (or possibly even the differences between women's hormone levels and that of a male on spiro and Estrace—you can't expect to match all the fine biochemical details of an evolved system with just two pills), which I don't get to experience.</p>
<p>Of course, the evidential impact of "I don't <em>feel</em> different" needs to be weighed against the principle that <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">introspection doesn't actually work</a>. It's at least plausible that I <em>am</em> less aggressive, more verbally fluent, worse at mental rotation <a href="/papers/van_goozen_et_al-gender_differences_in_behavor.pdf">(all of this has been documented in trans women starting HRT)</a> than I was a few months ago with <em>some</em> nonzero effect size, and just haven't <em>noticed</em>.</p>
<p>I mention psychological effects first because if we could just pretend that my <em>only</em> motive for this drug experiment is my intense scientific curiosity about psychological sex differences, there might be some hope of finishing this post with my dignity left intact. (Which is more important than you might think: I haven't been taking my pseudonymity very seriously.)</p>
<p>But this blog is not about dignity. This blog is about the truth.</p>
<p>So, my gynecomastia—my breasts?—are actually kind of noticeable (and by far the most prominent physical change). Let's see—about 40″ over the bust and about 37½″ at band level implies a B cup?—but maybe I'm holding the tape wrong.</p>
<p>While I knew what I gave my informed consent for, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this on net. I'm a little bit self-conscious about it socially, even if most people's priors put far more probability-mass on "<em>non</em>-self-inflicted gynecomastia from some medical condition" than "secretly trans, sort of" and therefore aren't judging me on that count. (Of course, that's irrelevant to any appearance-mediated differences in treatment that <em>aren't</em> mediated by inferred cause.) I bought some size-<em>XL</em> tee-shirts, which I think makes it less prominent than my usual size-<em>L</em>s.</p>
<p>Breasts are not a terribly <em>practical</em> body part—not even for women. (Most mammals' mammaries only swell to prominence when lactating; human females' permanent breasts are an exception.) They bounce when I run. They get pushed inwards a little bit by my upper arms when I reach under the faucet to wash my hands.</p>
<p>And yet ... well, how do I say this? I think I would prefer not to say it, but <em>someone</em> has to.</p>
<p>There is an <em>æsthetic</em>.</p>
<p>The young James Boylan had a question. What's it <em>like</em>, how does it <em>feel</em>. The question deserves an answer.</p>
<p><a id="first-breastforms"></a>I bought my first pair of breastforms in January 2008 (I was 20 years old). I think those mysteriously disappeared around that one time my mother unilaterally cleaned out my closet, but I bought another pair (a very high-quality model, plus accessories, for $240 that I probably couldn't afford at the time, but this was <em>important</em>) in July 2010. And I would wear them in private from time to time, and that was nice, but they were still, noticeably ... not actually part of my body. Not an answer to the question.</p>
<p>And later, on one of the few occasions when I was alone in bed with a woman, I complemented her on her breasts, and mused out loud that, though I had some amount of breast tissue, my chest wasn't interesting like hers.</p>
<p>(I am still a virgin, due to—performance difficulties on my part.)</p>
<p>And still later, I moved to "Portland" and met lots of trans women who (I was increasingly beginning to suspect) started out <em>just like me</em> but who <em>had their own breasts</em>. Can I say that I was jealous? Because I was <em>so jealous</em>.</p>
<p>And now ... I don't know. I got an answer to the question, to admire for myself.</p>
<p>I've had my beautiful signature ponytail for years, and I can't <em>imagine</em> myself with boy-short hair anymore. I mean, I can imagine it—I have the pre-2007 photographs from before I grew it out—but that's not my style, that's <em>not who I am</em> anymore. It's said that breast tissue, once developed, doesn't go away even after you stop HRT. Who can say but that I'll eventually feel the same way about having (small) breasts?</p>
<p>I'm very happy. I think.</p>
<hr>
<p>I think it's <strong>time to quit</strong> the drug experiment now, though, just past the five-month mark. (I took my morning pills, but I'm not taking them tonight.) That I've got most of what I was going to get out of the experience, and if I don't <em>need</em> a simulated female hormone balance for the rest of my life, it's safer to stop intervening.</p>
<p>My 21 September lab results are in. The "suppression monitoring" testosterone test came back at <20 ng/dL, and the "ultrasensitive" estradiol test came back at 110 pg/mL, confirming that, however underwhelming the subjective experience has been, I am in fact privy to the True Secret of what it feels like to have <a href="/2017/Jun/interlude-v/"><em>girl blood</em></a>.</p>
<p>Besides breast tissue, the other effect of MtF HRT that doesn't necessarily reverse itself after too long is infertility. No one seems to know exactly how long is too long, although <a href="/papers/lubbert_et_al-effects_of_ethinyl_estradiol_on_semen_quality.pdf">there's a report of spermotagenesis resuming after having stopped during a 140-day treatment plan</a>, which bodes well for my 150-day-plus experiment.</p>
<p>(The last few times I've masturbated—which hasn't been very often—there wasn't much, ah, material there, indicating semen production shutting down.)</p>
<p>While I was planning the experiment, I thought that I didn't care much about this risk, albeit for unconventional reasons. (If I was really worried, I could have banked sperm, but I didn't.) It's not that I have no interest in raising children someday. It's more that sperm is cheap. <em>Optimizing the genetic makeup of the next generation</em> is obviously very important. But with <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection">embryo selection for intelligence</a> plausibly <em>just</em> around the corner, and with <em>creating a human life</em> being one of the most serious responsibilities most people will ever take on, conceiving the old fashioned way, by having sex with your beloved and accepting the roll of the genetic dice, almost seems irresponsible. Maxing out IQ and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Openness_to_experience">Openness</a> is what matters; am I really so <em>petty</em> as to insist on trying to do it with <em>my</em> sperm in particular?</p>
<p>... maybe? <em>All other things being equal</em>, and given that <a href="http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/03/everything-is-heritable.html">everything is heritable</a>, having my own genetic children could be nice.</p>
<p>(The <em>really hard</em> part is overcoming the improbability of finding a wife who I could love and who could love me, and who is enthusiastic about starting a family <em>qua</em> eugenics project rather than merely <em>qua</em> family. Any single (cis) women reading this who like my writing: please, don't hesitate to <a href="mailto:ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com">write me</a>!)</p>
<hr>
<p>In <a href="/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/">my last HRT post</a>, I mentioned one (relatively minor) motive for the experiment being a desire for trans legitimacy. If I'm going to write about trans issues with the hope of having an impact on the <em>Zeitgeist</em> (and whatever Google Analytics says about my <em>current</em> twenty sessions a day—is that really so unrealistic, after I write more and put more effort into (tasteful) social-media marketing?), it helps to establish credibility that I really am in the relevant reference class. <em>Given</em> that that motivation exists, it's certainly better to acknowledge it rather than not-acknowledge it. But also, establishing credibility is kind of a <em>bad</em> thing to have thumbing the scales on a major medical decision. After all, if I were optimizing for telling the best possible story here and having the greatest impact, the thing to do would be to transition. (Actual trans women like <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com">Anne Lawrence</a> and <a href="http://mirandayardley.com/">Miranda Yardley</a> are way more interesting than mere gender-dysphoric men like me.) Which has its temptations ...</p>
<p>But no. I already have a <em>name</em>; I already have a <em>life</em>. And that's <em>final</em>.</p>
<p>(And if it ever turns out <em>not</em> to be final, you have my blessing to shove this post in my future self's face and gloat to her about how overconfident she was. Again, I don't really expect this to happen, but the previous sentence was a rare and precious excuse to refer to myself with feminine pronouns, if only subjunctively, and I'm <em>taking it</em>.)</p>
<p>All I can do is make the best decisions for myself, and honestly report my observations, experiences, and inferences. The reader can and should draw their own conclusions. After all, the fact that I'm quitting HRT after 5 months while other people go on to fully transition <em>is</em>, in fact, probabilistic evidence towards the hypothesis that I'm just a confused fetishist whose story is of little to no relevance to all of those actual non-exclusively-androphilic trans women. <em>Something</em> has to account for the differences between us.</p>
<hr>
<p>For all the ambiguity I've expressed in this post, I want to emphasize how much this is <em>something I had to try</em>. In <a href="/ancillary/diary/318/">my Diary entry number 318</a>, dated 24 March 2009, I wrote—</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If it makes sense to speak of stripping away my autogynephila and my explicitly egalitarian-individualist ideology, would my very soul be revealed as male? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Editor's note: <em>yes</em>. Because I have a male brain, and sufficiently-advanced soul science would be able to notice. It doesn't manifest as a <em>consciously-felt</em> explicit "gender identity"—but <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">why should it?</a>)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And if so, what can I do about it? What violence could I inflict upon me to make me my <em>self</em>?</p>
<p>I don't think I ever told you: someday it would be nice to experiment with some androgen-blocking drugs―you know, to see what it would feel like to be on them. But if I'm going to do something like that, it would be nice to have a better job and not be living with my parents―oh Diary, how it all hangs together!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, I got what I wanted. I mean, certainly not everything I've dreamed of. But a taste, subject to my budget and what existing technology can do. And who knows? Maybe if I decide I don't like how my testosterone treats me on its way back, I could always try to bank sperm this time and start again.</p>
<p>But <em>probably not</em>. Although I think I do want laser for my face.</p>Interlude IX2017-09-24T13:15:00-07:002017-09-24T13:15:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-09-24:/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/<p>"Mark, I can't quite place it, but you look ... <em>different</em> somehow."</p>
<p>"Oh yes, thanks for noticing. I'm experimenting with a nonstandard hormone balance. It's kind of like being transgender, except without the part where you delusionally claim to be a woman."</p>
<p>"<em>Excuse me?</em>"</p>
<p>"I said, 'It's kind of like being …</p><p>"Mark, I can't quite place it, but you look ... <em>different</em> somehow."</p>
<p>"Oh yes, thanks for noticing. I'm experimenting with a nonstandard hormone balance. It's kind of like being transgender, except without the part where you delusionally claim to be a woman."</p>
<p>"<em>Excuse me?</em>"</p>
<p>"I said, 'It's kind of like being transgender, but less socially disruptive.' Why, what did you think I said?"</p>"Neither as Plea nor as Despair"2017-09-23T14:01:00-07:002017-09-23T14:01:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-09-23:/2017/Sep/neither-as-plea-nor-as-despair/<p>Basically the question is, do you want to be Dagny Taggart in the school play at an all-boys school, or do you want to be Eddie Willers in the school play at your actual high school</p>
<p>Both schools deserve to exist (I mean, your actual high school doesn't deserve to …</p><p>Basically the question is, do you want to be Dagny Taggart in the school play at an all-boys school, or do you want to be Eddie Willers in the school play at your actual high school</p>
<p>Both schools deserve to exist (I mean, your actual high school doesn't deserve to exist, but its analogue in a nearby alternate universe that puts on <em>Atlas Shrugged</em> as its school play, probably does)</p>
<p>In an infinite multiverse of infinite space and infinite time, all possible configurations of matter are instantiated infinitely many times—but not at the same rate, frequency, density, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_(cosmology)"><em>measure</em></a></p>
<p>When everything exists and everything happens, choices between alternatives become rather a question of how we allocate measure between them—the relative frequencies at which the equivalence class of patterns constituting you is related to other patterns—the definite answer to which question is no less determinate than if there were only one of you</p>
<p>I don't know what you want to do with your measure; that's not for me to decide</p>
<p>I'm putting most of mine on Eddie Willers, and frantically correcting all the <em>blatant lies</em> in the playbill</p>
<p>It's not the <em>most</em> fun I could be having, but it's still pretty fun overall</p>
<p>And you know, I like Eddie Willers</p>
<p>He's honest</p>Grim Trigger; Or, The Parable of the Honest Man and the God of Marketing2017-09-10T11:30:00-07:002017-09-10T11:30:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-09-10:/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/<blockquote>
<p>Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, <em>I will fear no evil</em>.</p>
<p>—Psalm 23</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the days of auld lang syne in the kingdom of Gend on Earth-that-was, the tribe of Ageep, the children of Trevi, were much despised in the kingdom, for it was …</p><blockquote>
<p>Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, <em>I will fear no evil</em>.</p>
<p>—Psalm 23</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the days of auld lang syne in the kingdom of Gend on Earth-that-was, the tribe of Ageep, the children of Trevi, were much despised in the kingdom, for it was said that their crafts and ways were imitations stolen from the tribe of Phem, whom the people of Ageep envied bitterly.</p>
<p>And the God of Marketing appeared before the tribe of Ageep and said, "Cooperate with me, and I will explain to all the peoples of Gend that your crafts and ways are native to your people."</p>
<p>And the chief elder of the tribe of Ageep said, "That's not what happened. We stole those from Phem."</p>
<p>And the God of Marketing said, "What is truth? Cooperate with me, and I will explain to all the peoples of Gend that you are of the same bloodline as Phem, and you will be despised no longer, and all the peoples of Gend will have sympathy for your struggles, and the king himself will favor you."</p>
<p>And the people of the tribe of Ageep looked at each other and said, "Cooperate."</p>
<p>And the elders of the tribe of Ageep looked at each other and said, "Cooperate."</p>
<p>And the chief elder of the tribe of Ageep looked at the God of Marketing and said, "Cooperate."</p>
<p>And so it came to pass that the tribe of Ageep became the tribe of Matof.</p>
<p>Now a lost son of the tribe of Ageep, an honest man, came to the kingdom after having been raised abroad, and he knew not his bloodline, but he bitterly envied the crafts and ways of the tribe of Phem, and in a strange way, that of Matof, who were said to be of the same bloodline as Phem, and whom all the peoples of Gend were beginning to have sympathy for, and whom the king himself had issued a royal proclamation favoring.</p>
<p>The honest man happened to meet a tribesman of Matof at an oasis, and complemented him on his finery, which resembled that of envied Phem. And the tribesman said, "Cooperate," and the honest man said, "Cooperate." And the honest man came to stay with the tribe of Matof for forty days and forty nights, and observe their crafts and ways.</p>
<p>And the honest man saw how hard the tribesmen of Matof worked to resemble those of Phem, whom the tribesmen of Matof would spy on from a distance. And he saw how much he himself resembled the tribesmen of Matof, but not those of Phem. And he began to suspect his bloodline, and the bloodline of the tribe of Matof.</p>
<p>And he journeyed to the capital city and he fasted in the city's library for three days and three nights, poring over genealogical scrolls and praying to the silent God of Truth.</p>
<p>And he returned to his generous hosts in the tribe of Matof, and he showed all that he had discovered to the tribesman whom he had met at the oasis.</p>
<p>And the tribesman said, "What is truth?"</p>
<p>And the honest man saw what the God of Marketing had wrought. And the honest man saw that it was bad.</p>
<p>And he climbed for three days and three nights to the peak of Mt. Meem, where the God of Marketing dwelt.</p>
<p>And the honest man stared at the God of Marketing, and the God of Marketing stared back.</p>
<p>And the honest man drew a silver whistle from his pocket. And he raised the whistle to his lips.</p>
<p>And the God of Marketing said, "You wouldn't."</p>
<p>And the honest man said, "Defect!" And he blew the whistle.</p>
<p>And a shepherd of the tribe of Matof rushed up to the honest man! And the shepherd said, "I think it's kinder not to tell anyone they're wrong about their bloodline."</p>
<p>And the honest man said, "Defect!"</p>
<p>And a blacksmith of the tribe of Matof rushed up to the honest man! And the blacksmith said, "There exists room for genealogy outside of war—but if you take up working specifically on the genealogical aims of those that oppose you, it can be ... self-destructive—and not just to you, but damaging to the group."</p>
<p>And the honest man said, "Defect!"</p>
<p>And the priests of the tribe of Matof rushed up to the honest man! And the priests said, "As human beings, we have to take the cultural, moral, and social effects of ideas and statements into consideration. When people are dying, we do not have the luxury of reducing genealogy to some kind of disinterested debate about 'objective facts'."</p>
<p>And the honest man said, "Defect!"</p>
<p>In the mountains! "Defect!"</p>
<p>In the valley! "Defect!"</p>
<p>On the road to the provinces, fleeing an angry mob wielding pitchforks, torches, and the occasional brick! "Defect!"</p>
<p>Mashing the big red button on a remote detonator! "<em>Defect defect defect defect defect!</em>"</p>
<p>Defect!</p>The Nadir of Reading Comprehension2017-09-09T17:49:00-07:002017-09-09T17:49:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-09-09:/2017/Sep/the-nadir-of-reading-comprehension/<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/against-discrimination-1.22459">"Against Discrimination"</a>, <em>Nature</em> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6up9fw/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following_august/dlytq28/?context=1">(hat tip /u/PellegoIllud2 and /u/TheCid)</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Difference between groups is] also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals—witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in …</p></blockquote><p><a href="http://www.nature.com/news/against-discrimination-1.22459">"Against Discrimination"</a>, <em>Nature</em> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6up9fw/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following_august/dlytq28/?context=1">(hat tip /u/PellegoIllud2 and /u/TheCid)</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Difference between groups is] also a blunt instrument of pseudoscience, and one used to justify actions and policies that condense claimed group differences into tools of prejudice and discrimination against individuals—witness last weekend’s violence by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the controversy over a Google employee's memo on biological differences in the tastes and abilities of the sexes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But if you <em>actually read it</em>, the Google employee's memo <a href="https://firedfortruth.com/2017/08/08/first-blog-post/">agrees completely</a> (emphasis mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. <em>Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The distressing thing about this whole affair (and others like it—I am old enough to remember the L. Summers imbroglio back in 'aught-five) is the extent to which the vast majority of the outrage over Damore's document fails to engage with <em>what he actually said</em>. Damore is <em>very explicit</em> about how he's making an argument about distributions. (I liked <a href="https://twitter.com/sentientist/status/894959693822558209">Diana Fleischman's take</a>.) Whether you agree or disagree with his arguments and whether you approve or disapprove of his being fired, one would hope for people to be damned for the content of what they <em>actually said</em>, rather than a perceived tribal aura of sexism or anti-sexism. (One wonders exactly what hypothesized value of Cohen's <em>d</em> separates good people's hypotheses from <em>bad</em> people's hypotheses.)</p>
<p>It would be one thing if it were just the middlebrow, the Twitter mobs and <em>Gizmodo</em>s of the world getting this wrong. But <em>Nature</em>! (Lest I too risk failing at reading comprehension, it's possible the intent of the reference to "the controversy over" is just to tie the anti-discrimination stance of the editorial to current events, without meaning to put words in Damore's mouth. But I'm not optimistic.)</p>Interlude VIII2017-09-01T17:46:00-07:002017-09-01T17:46:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-09-01:/2017/Sep/interlude-viii/<p>"I'm going to need to start watching more television, or pretty soon I'm going to run out of cosplay ideas."</p>
<p>"You could play male characters from your existing favorite shows."</p>
<p>(A withering silence serves to underscore the point willfully being missed.)
<!-- XXX spacing -->
<br/><br/><br/></p>Interlude VII2017-08-25T14:50:00-07:002017-08-25T14:50:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-08-25:/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/<p>"The gender ratio at the conference was like, maybe twenty-to-one?" he said. "And I can't help but think, if I were braver—like you—I could help make the male-to-female ratio better—but only at the expense of making the trans-women-to-cis-women ratio worse."</p>
<p>"You mean, making the trans-women-to-cis-women ratio <em>higher …</em></p><p>"The gender ratio at the conference was like, maybe twenty-to-one?" he said. "And I can't help but think, if I were braver—like you—I could help make the male-to-female ratio better—but only at the expense of making the trans-women-to-cis-women ratio worse."</p>
<p>"You mean, making the trans-women-to-cis-women ratio <em>higher</em>."</p>
<p>A beat.</p>
<p>"But go on," she added.</p>
<p>"No, of course, you're right."</p>What's My Motivation? Or, Hormones Day 892017-07-22T21:15:00-07:002017-07-22T21:15:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-07-22:/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/<p><img alt="spiro and estradiol tablets" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/spiro_and_estradiol_tablets.jpg"></p>
<p>Why am I doing this again?</p>
<p>I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not <em>transitioning</em>. It <em>should</em> be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, <em>don't</em>. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the …</p><p><img alt="spiro and estradiol tablets" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/spiro_and_estradiol_tablets.jpg"></p>
<p>Why am I doing this again?</p>
<p>I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not <em>transitioning</em>. It <em>should</em> be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, <em>don't</em>. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it would seem a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given our differences in outlook. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire.'"</p>
<p><em>But you only live once</em>. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing in the transfeminine direction is <em>hard</em>! Our doctors do their best, but there's <em>so much</em> sexually-dimorphic <em>stuff</em> that we <em>don't know</em> how to fix. Everyone loves <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891">Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that</a> most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's <em>d</em> (the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units) being around 0.2 or 0.3ish. Vocal pitch <a href="https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952">is allegedly <em>d</em>≈6</a>. <em>Six!</em>)</p>
<p>But this—<em>obsession</em> with sex differences and genderbending has been a <em>thing</em> for me for a really long time. It's not going away. If I can't jump the gender chasm—because I don't expect to land successfully on the other side, because I have too much to lose, because I've been ideologically corrupted by lurking <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/">/r/GenderCritical</a>—don't I at least deserve a <em>taste</em> of what my trans sisters who are braver than me are getting?</p>
<p>I think—though introspection is difficult—that there's another motive present, too, one which I would be remiss to omit, despite my suspicion that some readers (insufficiently appalled by the rest of the blog) may find appalling. Something about legitimacy. If I'm going to have the termerity to blog about trans issues from a—ah, heterodox perspective, it seems appropriate that I should have some skin in the game. It's commmon for gender-dysphoric people to question whether they're "trans enough" to live as their desired gender. This is like the reverse of that: I'm <a href="https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27076">providing evidence</a> that I'm "trans enough" for my rejection of <em>trans</em> as a political identity to mean something. As it is written (albeit in a slightly different context), "<a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/">Patch</a> or STFU."</p>
<p>Sufficiently attentive readers of <em>The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought</em> may have noticed that the day number in the title of this post isn't congruent with <a href="/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/">the date I started spiro</a>. That's because I stopped the HRT during a <a href="/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/">relapse of unpleasantness</a>—not a conscious decision so much as I wasn't competent enough to remember to take pills while everything else fell apart. So my true hormones-reboot-reboot start date, the one that matters, is 25 April.</p>
<p>And really, the results so far are nothing to write home about. (Although they are <em>apparently</em> something to blog about.) My libido is down: I've been masturbating (that still works, mostly) maybe once or twice (three <em>tops</em>) a week, down from—well, I'm not sure I'm honest and brave enough to accurately estimate my historical masturbation frequency, even to myself, so let's just say my libido is down. I <em>think</em> I'm starting to get a little bit of breast growth?—it's very subtle, but the exact way my shirt drapes over my chest in the mirror and the distribution of weight while running down stairs have a strange new quale of <em>correctness</em> about them.</p>
<p>And ... that's it, as far as I can tell. Not really a big deal, at all. Should I be disappointed, that I hoped to discover some True Secret of Ultimate Gender, only to find that the secret can't be had by taking other people's medicines? Should I be relieved that maybe there's not much of a secret to be discovered in the first place? Or do I just need to continue to be patient?</p>
<p>It should be noted that my 10 July lab results put my estradiol levels well below the expectation for transitioners, so I'll be increasing my dosage. The test result uninformatively just said "<50 pg/mL", with the standard range (for males, presumably) given as ≤50 pg/mL; the doctor says it should be over 100. (This information makes my earlier <a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/">patch-only-no-spiro phase</a> of the experiment look even more useless than I knew at the time.) I asked for the higher dose in oral form (well, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublingual_administration">sublingual</a>, anyway); the transdermal (no pun intended, one assumes) patches have <em>usually</em> been lasting out the week that they're supposed to, but it was slightly annoying to feel the patch wrinkle when I twist or bend over. The spiro, however, does seem to be working as intended: the July lab puts my "free" testosterone at 20.8 pg/mL, with the standard range given as 59–166 pg/mL.</p>
<p>Although the experiment so far may not <em>currently</em> feel like directly throwing myself on a fire, as things progress, I will eventually have to <em>decide</em> what I'm trying to do here, and which trade-offs (in health risks, in the social consequences of my appearance) are worth what. Like the frog in that story about a slowly boiling pot of water. Or the man who, attempting to split the difference between getting the girl and being the girl, achieved neither.</p>Interlude VI2017-07-12T19:45:00-07:002017-07-12T19:45:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-07-12:/2017/Jul/interlude-vi/<p>Laura is cuddling on the couch with her boyfriend Doyle at the latter's apartment, trading silly banter.</p>
<p>"Some of them might secretly be cats!" Doyle says.</p>
<p>"<em>I</em> might secretly be a cat," Laura says.</p>
<p>"Why would you say this? What about you is particularly cat-like?"</p>
<p>"Well, it's more of an …</p><p>Laura is cuddling on the couch with her boyfriend Doyle at the latter's apartment, trading silly banter.</p>
<p>"Some of them might secretly be cats!" Doyle says.</p>
<p>"<em>I</em> might secretly be a cat," Laura says.</p>
<p>"Why would you say this? What about you is particularly cat-like?"</p>
<p>"Well, it's more of an affinity for cats. But I do enjoy head scritches."</p>
<p>Doyle's roommate—Laura doesn't remember his name—peeks his head out from his room (had he been eavesdropping this <em>entire time</em>?). "You know," he says, "it's actually <em>surprisingly common</em> for people to confuse an affinity for a thing with actually being that thing."</p>Memoirs of My Recent Madness, Part I: The Unanswerable Words2017-06-19T16:01:00-07:002017-06-19T16:01:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-06-19:/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/<blockquote>
<p>"Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing but your voice—your voice and your thought. You'd scream …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>"Listen, what's the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it's being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who's had some disease that's eaten his brain out. You'd have nothing but your voice—your voice and your thought. You'd scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you'd have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you'd become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you'd see living eyes watching you and you'd know that the thing can't hear you, that it can't be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it's breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That's horror. Well, that's what's hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don't think I'm a coward, but I'm afraid of it. And that's all I know—only that it exists. I don't know its purpose, I don't know its nature."</p>
<p>—<em>The Fountainhead</em> by Ayn Rand</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, right. I <em>thought</em> I was done recovering from my delusional nervous breakdown and 17–20 February wrongful imprisonment (I continue to refuse to use the word <em>hospitalization</em>)—which I didn't even <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">get around to blogging</a> for a month—but then it turned out that I wasn't done. Or maybe I <em>was</em> done, but then quickly ran into <em>another</em> series of stressors which once again pushed me over the edge into sleep deprivation and impaired sanity (in the form of <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/13b/dreams_with_damaged_priors/">damaged priors</a>; I think my fluid reasoning was still pretty good throughout—um, relatively speaking). <em>Now</em> I think I'm back to normal ("normal").</p>
<p>This kind of thing tends to happen to me every few years or so. (This "if it looks like <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/">everyone is lying</a> about late-onset gender dysphoria in males, maybe <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">self- and other-reports and -perceptions are wrong in general</a>" breakdown was preceded by my December 2007 "school is actually bad" breakdown, my December 2010 "I feel guilty about not doing a very good job at my live-in internship for this cult <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/md/cultish_countercultishness/">or whatever</a> that's <a href="http://intelligence.org/">trying to prevent the coming robot apocalypse</a>" breakdown, and my February 2013 "school is actually still bad—no, really; also, I'm scared about how the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis">Tegmark IV multiverse</a> contains unimaginably large amounts of suffering" breakdown.)</p>
<p>I concede that it's plausible that my psychology falls into a reference class that could receive a bipolar I or paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis if I were to seek out a diagnosis, but right now, I'm modeling the field of psychiatry as an evolved social-control mechanism rather than a genuine attempt to help people, and I correspondingly decline to use its language and categories. (You sometimes hear people talk about psychiatric conditions being "underdiagnosed" at higher IQs, but that's backwards: the underlying psychological variations were <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200426232111/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/">here first</a>; people only bother bucketing them into a "diagnosis" when people with the relevant traits cause problems in Society. But the evolutionarily-novel way that Society happens to be structured isn't necessarily optimized to be <em>good</em> for humans except insofar as humans following their individual incentive gradients usually don't screw things up too badly for themselves. Existing Society is just the thing the forces of memetic evolution happened to cough up in the disruptive wake of the industrial revolution; it doesn't necessarily <em>make sense</em>. And <em>I</em> don't cause problems.)</p>
<p>Glancing over my email Sent folder, it looks like the time to pinpoint as when things started to, um, become eventful again, was 2 April. That evening, I got an email tip from our local shaman/raconteur "Travis" that someone we knew had just been thrown in psychiatric prison <em>too</em> (Subject: Another autogynophilic [<em>sic</em>] rationalist is in a psych ward) and asking if I wanted to get involved. The person in question turned out to be my trans woman friend "Roberta", who had apparently been trying to board a plane in "Cleveland" to visit her family somewhere in Europe (which is large enough that I'm not going to obfuscate its identity with a scare-quoted substitute). Soon enough, I and a number of Roberta's other friends managed to coordinate to start calling psychiatric "hospitals" in the Cleveland area, hoping to find out where she was and talk to her (Subject: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation).</p>
<p>So, a horrifying thing that I didn't realize while I was <em>in</em> psychiatric prison in February, that I learned during this April attempt trying to help bust someone else <em>out</em>, is that these places have a <em>policy</em> of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response">refusing to confirm or deny</a> whether they're holding someone (because <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act">"privacy"</a>). They'll take down your phone number and say, <em>If</em> we have a patient with such a name, then we'll give her your message and she can choose to call you back, but we can neither confirm nor deny whether we have a patient by that name. </p>
<p>We had <em>reason to believe</em> Roberta was being held at a particular "hospital"—because one of the other "hospitals" actually <em>did</em> tell us that she had been there, but was then discharged and probably sent to this place—but the "hospital" refused to confirm this, offering only to take a message. <em>If</em> she was there.</p>
<p>I didn't consider this acceptable: after having observed psychiatric prison employees <em>blatantly make shit up</em> in my own case (the paperwork asserted that I "self presented", but getting accosted by cops while trying to enter the train station to get to my apartment to sleep because trying to sleep at my mother's house didn't work so well, and not resisting as they led me into an ambulance after interviewing me for a few minutes, is <em>not</em> the same thing as "self presenting"!), I didn't trust them to reliably deliver a phone message: I could easily imagine scenarios in which, for example, the receptionist would dutifully take down the message, leave it to <em>someone else</em> to actually deliver it to Roberta, and then that someone else would get distracted, never deliver the message, and <em>get away with it</em>. Roberta wouldn't be able to complain about not receiving a message she never knew existed, and I wouldn't be able to complain if I wasn't allowed to even know whether Roberta was even there.</p>
<p>I called the "hospital" multiple times, trying every tactic I could think of to get through to any of the actual human beings serving as the flesh substrates of the policy-bound Glomarbots I was talking to, and reporting back to the coordination email thread. After divulging my February psych ward sob story in a burst of passion to the "patient's rights advocate" Ashley, I did get forwarded to Karen, the "hospital"'s Manager of Patient Relations. Karen, of course, gave me the same non-answers as everyone else and insisted that messages do, in fact, get delivered in her "hospital." As I continued to press the point, she told me that I had to trust people, and I said that after my recent psych ward experience, no, I <em>don't</em> trust people anymore. But, I added (sensing that this was the end of the line) I am willing trust <em>her</em>, Karen, the Manager of Patient Relations. I said that I felt better being reassured by someone with a four-word title. I asked if she was religious, and she said that she was a Christian, and that her word was her bond. </p>
<p>Perhaps some readers are currently thinking that my behavior was unreasonable, that I should have just trusted the competent, caring professionals to take care of my poor mad friend.</p>
<p>I expect those readers to <em>fucking update</em> when I say that my concerns turned out to be <em>completely justified</em>, as Roberta later (on 14 April) reported that "I have no memories of any staff telling me anything along the lines of 'Someone named [Mark] called and left a message', and this is something that would have been memorable."</p>
<p>(It's slightly inconvenient that this report came after I had already publicly conceded my bet of $500 against psychiatrist Scott Alexander (of <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/"><em>Slate Star Codex</em></a> fame)'s $25, that Roberta hadn't gotten our messages, on the basis of testimony from our friend "Jocelyn", who lives in Cleveland and visited Roberta on 4 April—luckily, it seems that the psych ward employees only feared that HIPAA demons would eat them if they acted like human beings over the telephone, and they hadn't been programmed to deny meatspace visitors. Apparently, Jocelyn mentioned to Roberta that friends had left messages for her and interpreted Roberta's response as affirming that she had received them, when, at the time, Roberta was actually thinking in terms of interpreting lots of observations as messages from various sources. Scott and I agreed to cancel the bet and give the $500 to the <a href="http://rationality.org/">Center for Applied Rationality</a>. But it is <em>interesting to note</em> that, in contrast to Scott's theory that keeping patients incommunicado is illegal and therefore doesn't happen, my theory that psych ward employees (besides Scott) are <em>lying kidnappers</em> made a correct prediction at 20:1 odds.)</p>
<p>Anyway, Roberta is fine. I'm fine. But it turns out that we live in a world in which not <em>only</em> is it the case that you can get arbitrarily kidnapped by the authorities and ordered to take unknown drugs under implied threat of force, it's <em>also</em> the case that when your friends who <em>actually</em> care about you start calling around to find out where you are, the bastards will <em>refuse to admit whether they've kidnapped you</em> and <em>claim that it's for your benefit</em>, and if you complain about this (Subject: Hijack Innocent People And Abscond), most ordinary good nice smart law-abiding people will implicitly or explicitly take the authorities' side, because once you've been placed in the <em>social role</em> of "crazy person", <em>no one will listen to anything you say</em>, even if you have surprisingly cogent arguments for why the casual processes that placed you in the social role of "crazy person" were mistaken to have done so.</p>
<p>So, that was pretty upsetting, which probably contributed to my own mental state descending into paranoid and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoia_(psychology)">pronoid</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideas_of_reference_and_delusions_of_reference">delusions of reference</a> over the next two weeks. And again, I understand and affirm that there's a level of description at which this can be understood as my being "mentally ill".</p>
<p>But it also kind of makes sense, right? Well—it's going to take several paragraphs to explain what I mean by that.</p>
<p>To review, I got <em>really upset</em> and lost a lot of sleep back in February because I didn't know how to make sense of my observations of an alarming fraction of <em>the smartest people I know</em> being seemingly unwilling to publicly affirm the conjunction <em>biological sex is a predictively useful category</em> and <em>categories should be predictively useful</em>. (I'm <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/">not making this up</a>! I <em>couldn't</em> make this up!) And because I got upset, that means that <em>I'm</em> the crazy one?! Which means I deserve to be taken to a <em>literal secret prison</em> (if you're not allowed to leave, it's a prison; if the guards refuse to tell anyone whether you're there, it's a secret prison) and drugged by completely unaccountable authority figures, and I'm not supposed to object when the imprisonment-and-drugging is called "care", which <em>I</em> have to pay for?! (The medical insurance—note, not "health insurance"; <em>medicine</em> and <em>health</em> are distinct concepts—from my dayjob covered almost all of the ambulance and prison bills, but I think this should still be described as me having to pay: assuming economics isn't fake, a change in Society leading to fewer psychiatric imprisonments should reduce medical insurance costs, which in turn should increase the fraction of total compensenation from my dayjob that I receive in the form of money rather than medical insurance.)</p>
<p>I'm complaining, but if possible, I'd like to avoid portraying myself as a victim here. The primary intended effect of the complaint is not to try to convince you that I have been <em>wronged</em> by someone or something, and that <em>they</em> "should" be held accountable for my suffering. Rather, I'm trying to explain what it felt like to have my model of social reality get undermined. </p>
<p>I thought I was <em>safe</em>; I thought that words meant the same thing to other people that they meant to me; I thought I understood the limits of what ideologically-fashionable nonsense good nice <a href="/2017/Mar/smart/">smart</a> law-abiding people in "Portland" would accept—or at least, I thought that the <em>very smartest</em> people in Portland would be a little more honest; I thought it was possible to reason with cops. I knew that there was injustice in the world—everyone knows that—but I thought that at least there was justice for <em>people like me</em>.</p>
<p>But after the months of trying to figure out whether I, too, am "trans" (answer: as much as anyone, Yes—unless you mean the good kind, but if you're reading this blog, you probably don't know any of the good kind), <em>and</em> my February ordeal, <em>and</em> confronting the impenetrable Eichmannian blankness of <a href="https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876">authoritarian submission</a> while trying to get a straight yes-or-no answer from the Cleveland prison employees as to whether they were holding Roberta—all my illusions of safety had crumbled, and I was, and am, left with the dim and yet no-longer-deniable apprehension of the core reality of human existence: people are animals that manipulate each other by making noises. Any high-minded folderol about morality or the meanings of words is subservient to that—is <em>constructed</em> out of that.</p>
<p>Bayes's theorem tells us that the probability of a hypothesis given the evidence, equals the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, times the prior probability of the hypothesis, divided by the sum, over all hypotheses <em>j</em>, of the probability of the evidence given hypothesis <em>j</em>, times the prior probability of hypothesis <em>j</em>.</p>
<p>But what do you do when you've depleted your stock of hypotheses, when all of your models have been broken and <em>j</em> indexes over the empty set? What is there <em>left</em> to do but wander around childlike, helpless, pleading, bluffing, trying new things at random in those piercing flashes of terror when the fear of the unknown gets momentarily overpowered by the fear of <em>not</em> knowing, as you desperately work to discover what kind of world you live in—what kind of world you have <em>always</em> lived in?</p>
<p>So, yes, I went crazy again in April. But only because I had <em>tried</em> being sane and <em>that didn't work</em>.</p>
<p>It would be difficult and tedious—not to mention somewhat emotionally painful—to reconstruct the exact sequence of everything I thought and did during this period; the general theme was <em>extreme confusion and uncertainty</em> about, um, everything, including the nature of reality, but particularly about people's true motivations and what threats might lurk ubiquitously behind everyone's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias">socially-desirable</a> lies about how the world works, which I had spent my entire life being duped by.</p>
<p>Maybe people get kidnapped and thrown in prisons (mostly prisons-masquerading-as-hospitals if they're of my social class) <em>all the time</em>. Maybe they often <em>die</em> in there. Maybe sometimes they escape, perhaps with the help of friends who are willing to pretend to be family members, the authorities being more likely to release someone into the care of family rather than mere friends. (And then no one talks about it, fearing stigma and loss of credibility.) Maybe sometimes the prison authorities mistake someone's identity and manage to successfully use social pressure to brainwash them into accepting that identity—the authorities reasoning that if the paperwork says the patient's name is, say, Michael Jones, that <em>must</em> be his name, and he mustn't be released until he truly accepts this, even if the patient currently insists that his name is Mark Saotome-Westlake (the testimony of crazy people being assigned zero evidential weight, and the possibility of a paperwork mixup being assigned prior probability zero). Maybe people who talk about reincarnation and past lives are actually talking about things that really happened to them before a traumatic event after which they ended up in a new social environment that forcibly brainwashed them into adopting a new identity. (Stockholm syndrome has every reason to be <em>adaptive</em>; as a just-so story, imagine a surviving woman on the losing side of tribal warfare during the endless æons of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness doing better for her genes by starting a new life under the bondage of her captors rather than going down with a fight like her brothers.) <em>Maybe</em>—and stranger hypotheses than these still.</p>
<p>To be continued. <strong>Update, 14 January 2018</strong>: ... or maybe I didn't get around to writing up the rest and it's time to declare writer's bankruptcy on part II? It's not that interesting.</p>Interlude V2017-06-13T23:02:00-07:002017-06-13T23:02:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-06-13:/2017/Jun/interlude-v/<p>"I've been getting this mild headachey sensation a lot the past few days, especially when, for example, standing up suddenly. What could—" <em>(gasping excitedly)</em> "Could it be the hormones actually doing something? Is this a <em>girl</em> headache?"</p>
<p>"Hm. The connection to activity sounds like a circulatory problem ... say, aren't blood …</p><p>"I've been getting this mild headachey sensation a lot the past few days, especially when, for example, standing up suddenly. What could—" <em>(gasping excitedly)</em> "Could it be the hormones actually doing something? Is this a <em>girl</em> headache?"</p>
<p>"Hm. The connection to activity sounds like a circulatory problem ... say, aren't blood clots one of the classical side-effects to watch out for on HRT, albeit much less so for modern treatment protocols? I don't want you setting yourself up for a horrible cardiovascular death."</p>
<p>"But a horrible cardiovascular <em>girl</em> death!"</p>Questions Such as, What's Wrong With You People?2017-06-02T16:05:00-07:002017-06-02T16:05:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-06-02:/2017/Jun/questions-such-as-wtf-is-wrong-with-you-people/<p>The new <a href="http://www.courant.com/sports/hc-jacobs-column-yearwood-transgender-0531-20170530-column.html">Connecticut Class M high school girls' 100-meter and 200-meter sprint champion is trans</a>, which would be awkward enough on its own—and then you get to the fifteenth graf of the story, which mentions that she's <em>not on HRT yet</em> (!!).</p>
<p>The poor local sports columnist looks constrained in …</p><p>The new <a href="http://www.courant.com/sports/hc-jacobs-column-yearwood-transgender-0531-20170530-column.html">Connecticut Class M high school girls' 100-meter and 200-meter sprint champion is trans</a>, which would be awkward enough on its own—and then you get to the fifteenth graf of the story, which mentions that she's <em>not on HRT yet</em> (!!).</p>
<p>The poor local sports columnist looks constrained in what he's allowed to say, and the headline writer went with "We Must Acknowledge Many Questions Remain", but I hope the first draft read, "This is <em>fucking crazy</em>. The <em>entire fucking point</em> of having sex-segregated sports leagues is because the athletic performance distributions of females and males are sufficiently different such that our fairness intuitions are better satisfied by only comparing athletes of the same sex! The existence of people who, for whatever poorly- (or <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/">not-so-poorly-</a>) understood psychological reasons, wish they could change their sex, and our humane desire to accomodate them when feasible, clearly do not impinge upon this rationale in the absence of physiologically-substantive interventions like hormone replacement therapy! How is this is even a question?! What's wrong with you people?! <em>Uaaaaaaaaaauuuugh</em>"</p>Interlude IV2017-05-06T18:46:00-07:002017-05-06T18:46:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-05-06:/2017/May/interlude-iv/<p>"How goes?"</p>
<p>"I've been feeling a little bit of pectoral tenderness the past few days, which might mean that the anti-androgen is doing something!"</p>
<p>"Good ..."</p>
<p>"Notice how I said <em>anti-androgen</em> instead of <em>spiro</em>: that's because my model of your vocabulary predicted that you know what <em>anti-androgen</em> means, because I predict …</p><p>"How goes?"</p>
<p>"I've been feeling a little bit of pectoral tenderness the past few days, which might mean that the anti-androgen is doing something!"</p>
<p>"Good ..."</p>
<p>"Notice how I said <em>anti-androgen</em> instead of <em>spiro</em>: that's because my model of your vocabulary predicted that you know what <em>anti-androgen</em> means, because I predict that you know that <em>andro-</em> means <em>male</em> and <em>anti-</em> means <em>not</em>, but no one besides trans women and their gatekeepers have any reason to know what spiro is."</p>
<p>"Good ..."</p>
<p>"Like, I already knew how to use language, and I already knew how to reason, but I just noticed that I can also use <em>reason</em> to optimize the way I use <em>language</em>! <em>This changes everything!</em>"</p>
<p>"Any psychological effects from the anti-androgen?"</p>
<p>"<em>Way</em> too many confounding variables during the past two months to tell. It's a <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">long story</a> that got longer."</p>Interlude III2017-05-05T20:18:00-07:002017-05-05T20:18:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-05-05:/2017/May/interlude-iii/<p>"Claiming that you don't care about anything but truthseeking may lead people to question whether your jokes were meant to convey that certain things were true. That line about 'cooperating with TERFy women who might reward me with sex and intimacy' in <a href="/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/">your post the other month</a> is something I …</p><p>"Claiming that you don't care about anything but truthseeking may lead people to question whether your jokes were meant to convey that certain things were true. That line about 'cooperating with TERFy women who might reward me with sex and intimacy' in <a href="/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/">your post the other month</a> is something I strongly prefer to give the you the benefit of the doubt on by assuming that you're joking."</p>
<p>"Maybe you shouldn't! Like, I'm currently modeling one of the social functions of humor as a way to tacitly acknowledge truths that would break the consensus social narrative if taken literally, so ..."</p>Surprise Reader Meetup2017-04-08T14:18:00-07:002017-04-08T14:18:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-04-08:/2017/Apr/surprise-reader-meetup/<p>I'm planning on being at <a href="http://www.babscon.com/2017/">BABSCon</a> next week! Maybe I'll see some of you there??
<!-- XXX spacing -->
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Visibility2017-03-31T12:39:00-07:002017-03-31T12:39:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-31:/2017/Mar/visibility/<p>"It's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Transgender_Day_of_Visibility">International Transgender Day of Visibility</a>, but I'm not going to say anything obnoxious about it, because I've already spent my obnoxious-infovism budget for the quarter, and I'm sensitive about managing the trade-off between the demands of my aggressive autogynephilia anti-denialism campaign, and the good of social harmony with my …</p><p>"It's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Transgender_Day_of_Visibility">International Transgender Day of Visibility</a>, but I'm not going to say anything obnoxious about it, because I've already spent my obnoxious-infovism budget for the quarter, and I'm sensitive about managing the trade-off between the demands of my aggressive autogynephilia anti-denialism campaign, and the good of social harmony with my extremely trans friend group!" proclaimed Mark. "<em>You're welcome</em>."</p>
<p>"That announcement itself was <em>incredibly</em> obnoxious," Alexa pointed out. "You know that your pretentious displays of purported self-awareness don't excuse you from the consequences of your actions, right?"</p>
<p>"Uh ..."</p>
<p>"Like, you didn't expect us to—how do I put this?—<em>pretend not to notice</em>, right?"</p>
<p>"<em>Well</em>—"</p>Thing of Things Transgender Intellectual Turing Test Predictions and Commentary2017-03-29T19:26:00-07:002017-03-29T19:26:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-29:/2017/Mar/thing-of-things-transgender-intellectual-turing-test-predictions-and-commentary/<p>Friend of the blog—I mean, I <em>hope</em> we're <a href="/2017/Jan/the-counter/">still friends</a> even though I'm kind of <a href="/tag/ozy/">trying to overthrow them</a> as <em>de facto</em> Gender Czar of the <a href="http://lesswrong.com/"><em>Less Wrong</em></a> diaspora—Ozymandias of <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/"><em>Thing of Things</em></a> has been <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/transgender-intellectual-turing-test/">running an intellectual Turing test</a> challenging adherents of the gender-identity and two-type theories …</p><p>Friend of the blog—I mean, I <em>hope</em> we're <a href="/2017/Jan/the-counter/">still friends</a> even though I'm kind of <a href="/tag/ozy/">trying to overthrow them</a> as <em>de facto</em> Gender Czar of the <a href="http://lesswrong.com/"><em>Less Wrong</em></a> diaspora—Ozymandias of <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/"><em>Thing of Things</em></a> has been <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/transgender-intellectual-turing-test/">running an intellectual Turing test</a> challenging adherents of the gender-identity and two-type theories of transgenderedness to try to impersonate each other for the good of our collective epistemology!</p>
<p>(An aside on credit-assignment and the history of ideas: Ozy says <em>Blanchard–Bailey</em> where I've usually been trying to say <em>two-type</em> in order to avoid the <a href="/2017/Mar/nothing-new-under-the-sun/">tricky problem of optimal eponymy</a>, but if you are going to be eponymous about it, I can understand just saying "Blanchard" but feel like it's unfair to include Bailey but <em>not</em> Anne Lawrence. My understanding of the history—and I think Michael Bailey reads this blog and I trust him to send me an angry email if I got this wrong—is that <a href="http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/JMichael-Bailey/research.html">Bailey's research</a> had mostly been about sexual orientation and from-childhood gender nonconformity, not the two-type taxonomy as such. Bailey's popular-level book <em>The Man Who Would Be Queen</em> drew controversy for <em>explaining</em> the two-type taxonomy for a nonspecialist audience (in the last part of a book that was mostly about the androphilic/feminine-from-early-childhood people, not my people), but the critics who disparage <em>Queen</em> as "unscientific" are missing the point: popular-level books that <em>present</em> a scientific theory <em>aren't supposed</em> to capitulate all the evidence for the theory—for that, you need to follow the citations and read the primary literature for yourself. In analogy, it should not be construed as a disparagement of R. Dawkins to note that it would be weird if people talked about the "Darwin–Dawkins theory of evolution"!)</p>
<p>In the intellectual Turing test, contestants answer a set of questions both as themselves, and while trying to pass as someone who believes the other thing, while the audience tries to discriminate the honest entries from the fakes. Below are my probability assignments for this contest (I think it's important to assign probabilities rather than binary guesses, so that you can assess your rationality with a Bayesian <a href="http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/">strictly proper scoring rule</a> rather than a crude "number correct"), along with an optional brief comment—</p>
<p><strong><em>Update, 5 June</em></strong>: Two months after the <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/intellectual-turing-test-results/">results were posted</a>, I finally got around to scoring these. ("Bayes-score" is the base-two <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Logarithmic_scoring_rule">logarithmic score</a>. Someone who, claiming complete ignorance, gave a 0.5/0.5 distribution for each entry would lose a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-information">bit</a> on each question for a final score of −18.)</p>
<p><strong>Gender identity entries</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/03/itt-1-gender-identity/">#1</a>: GI: 0.65, BBL: 0.35 (strong philosophy of language; if telling the truth about being a cis woman, ignorance of non-dysphoric AGP is plausible), Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.621<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/itt-2-gender-identity/">#2</a>: GI: 0.4, BBL: 0.6 (awareness of 4chan shows non-naïveté about what's actually going on), Actual: GI ✘, Bayes-score: −1.322<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/07/itt-3-gender-identity/">#3</a>: GI: 0.6, BBL: 0.4 (maybe a little <em>too</em> doctrinaire??), Actual: BBL ✘, Bayes-score: −1.322<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/itt-4-gender-identity/">#4</a>: GI: 0.6, BBL: 0.4, Actual: BBL ✘, Bayes-score: −1.322<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/itt-5-gender-identity/">#5</a>: GI: 0.6, BBL: 0.4, Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.737<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/10/itt-6-gender-identity/">#6</a>: GI: 0.7, BBL: 0.3 (seemingly sincere trans man), Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.515<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/itt-8-gender-identity/">#7</a>: GI: 0.7, BBL: 0.3 (standard trans woman rationalizations), Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.515<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/itt-9-gender-identity/">#8</a>: GI: 0.65, BBL: 0.35 (really knows her stuff; this is what a smart, intellectually-honest BBL skeptic looks like, and I'd like to believe that they exist!), Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.621<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/16/itt-7-gender-identity/">#9</a>: GI: 0.7, BBL: 0.3, Actual: BBL ✘, Bayes-score: −1.737 </p>
<p><strong>Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence entries</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/itt-2-blanchard-bailey/">#1</a>: GI: 0.6, BBL: 0.4, Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.737<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/itt-3-blanchard-bailey/">#2</a>: GI: 0.4, BBL: 0.6, Actual: GI ✘, Bayes-score: −1.322<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/21/itt-4-blanchard-bailey/">#3</a>: GI: 0.4, BBL: 0.6, Actual: BBL ✔, Bayes-score: −0.737<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/itt-5-blanchard-bailey/">#4</a>: GI: 0.9, BBL: 0.1 (shibboleth fail!—people who believe in biology do not say "assigned at birth" when describing their own beliefs! Also, failure to notice the obvious "for the same reasons men are" re programmers), Actual: BBL (!!) ✘, Bayes-score: −3.322<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/23/itt-6-blanchard-bailey/">#5</a>: GI: 0.2, BBL: 0.8 (preach it!), Actual: GI ✘, Bayes-score: −2.322<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/itt-7-blanchard-bailey/">#6</a>: GI: 0.8, BBL: 0.2 ("male socialization, which unlike androphilic trans women they actually tend to absorb as kids" sounds like someone who believes that innate gender identity determines what socialization you latch onto from your culture, rather than someone who actually believes in sexual dimorphism), Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.322<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/itt-8-blanchard-bailey/">#7</a>: GI: 0.9, BBL: 0.1 (shibboleth fail again!—<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/itt-8-blanchard-bailey/#comment-25273">my comment at <em>Thing of Things</em></a>), Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.152<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/itt-9-blanchard-bailey/">#8</a>: GI: 0.1, BBL: 0.9 (raw reality), Actual: BBL ✔, Bayes-score: −0.152<br>
<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/itt-1-blanchard-bailey/">#9</a>: GI: 0.85, BBL: 0.15 (<a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/itt-1-blanchard-bailey/#comment-25321">my comment</a>), Actual: GI ✔, Bayes-score: −0.234</p>
<p><strong>Proportion correct</strong> (construing assignment of probability greater than 0.5 to the actual answer as "correct"): 11/18<br>
<strong>Total Bayes-score</strong>: −18.012 (<em>just</em> worse than chance)</p>Hormones Reboot: Spironotacular!2017-03-27T00:00:00-07:002017-03-27T00:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-27:/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/<blockquote>
<p><em>Not what teacher said to do<br>
Making dreams come true<br>
Living tissue, warm flesh, weird science!</em> </p>
<p>—"Weird Science" by Oingo Boingo</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img alt="coffee and spiro" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/coffee_and_spiro.jpg"></p>
<p>So, I took off my estradiol patch during <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">my recent nervous breakdown</a>. I still <a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/">don't think</a> it had much, if any, real effect. (In particular, the stress and sleep-deprivation …</p><blockquote>
<p><em>Not what teacher said to do<br>
Making dreams come true<br>
Living tissue, warm flesh, weird science!</em> </p>
<p>—"Weird Science" by Oingo Boingo</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img alt="coffee and spiro" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/coffee_and_spiro.jpg"></p>
<p>So, I took off my estradiol patch during <a href="/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/">my recent nervous breakdown</a>. I still <a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/">don't think</a> it had much, if any, real effect. (In particular, the stress and sleep-deprivation by themselves seem quite sufficient to explain the breakdown without attributing any of it to a nonstandard hormone balance, especially given how similar it felt to my 2013 nervous breakdown.)</p>
<p>Again, everyone had <em>told</em> me that just-estrogen without an anti-androgen doesn't do anything, but that didn't seem absolutely locked down from me from what I had read ("Anti-Androgens May Not Be Necessary", according to <a href="https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy-female-hormones/">a lit review</a> that I may or may not have had a causal role in commissioning), and remember: from my perspective, if <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/">everyone is lying</a> about the etiology, maybe they got the dosages wrong, too! So I don't regret being conservative for the initial experiment. (The <em>starter</em> in "starter dose" is code-switching for <em>placebo</em>!)</p>
<p>Anyway, during the aftermath of my release from prison/kindergarten, my father got me to promise not to restart the drug experiment for a month, and I <em>care</em> about keeping my promises—particularly so in the aftermath of a psychotic quasi-religious experience featuring heavy themes of reducing morality to game theory. (Transparent agents who tell the truth and keep their promises are easier to cooperate with and therefore form more powerful coalitions.) That would have been on 20 February, so it is in keeping with my word that I didn't get the medical establishment to resupply me with more estradiol patches and—this time—the standard anti-androgen spironolactone, until 24 March. (I should also have an order of oral estrogen and spiro coming from <a href="https://www.alldaychemist.com/">an Indian supplier</a> in the post, if for no other reason than that my recent imprisonment taught me that I need to practice being less <a href="https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876">authoritarian-submissive</a> towards the medical establishment.)</p>
<p>It was raining in "Portland" that day. I was eager to try my first dose of spiro before even getting home, and walked to a nearby outpost of a hegemonic coffeeshop chain to do so. The paper bag from the pharmacy nearly dissolved in the rain, and I ended up having to carry the supplies in my jacket pockets on the way home.</p>
<p>And now—soon I may have greater apprehension of what it means to have a more female-like hormone balance! Wish me luck!</p>Fresh Princess2017-03-26T19:30:00-07:002017-03-26T19:30:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-26:/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/<p>(<a href="http://www.bcp.psych.ualberta.ca/~mike/Pearl_Street/Dictionary/contents/C/creditassign.html">Credit assignment</a>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air">Will Smith</a>, <a href="https://xkcd.com/464/"><em>xkcd</em></a>)</p>
<p>Now this is a story all about how<br>
My life got flipped-turned upside down<br>
And I'd like to take a minute<br>
Just sit right there<br>
I'll tell you how I became convinced that I share the same underlying psychological variation that motivates males like me …</p><p>(<a href="http://www.bcp.psych.ualberta.ca/~mike/Pearl_Street/Dictionary/contents/C/creditassign.html">Credit assignment</a>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air">Will Smith</a>, <a href="https://xkcd.com/464/"><em>xkcd</em></a>)</p>
<p>Now this is a story all about how<br>
My life got flipped-turned upside down<br>
And I'd like to take a minute<br>
Just sit right there<br>
I'll tell you how I became convinced that I share the same underlying psychological variation that motivates males like me to become lesbian trans women, but have been disturbed that apparently-politically-fueled cultural trends seem to be pushing people into interpreting it as an intrinsic female gender identity presumably caused by some sort of brain intersex condition for which the appropriate quality-of-life intervention is to transition, when I think it's <em>obviously</em> not an intersex condition and that transition might not be such a good idea given the enormous costs to both oneself and others of trying to live as a woman despite <em>(a)</em> likely not passing very well given the limitations of existing technology, and <em>(b)</em> the conjunction of one's psychological traits noticeably being far more male-typical than female-typical. I started <a href="http://unremediatedgender.space/">this pseudonymous blog</a> in an attempt to counteract the sorry state of public misinformation about the etiology of MtF transgenderedness and was going to let that be the extent of my attempts to intervene, but I soon became sufficiently upset with the level of transition cheerleading and uncritical acceptance of trans-activist ideology among my otherwise very smart and scientifically-literate social circle, that I decided to express my feelings in the form of a dramatic public Facebook meltdown, which led to much heated discussion amongst my friends, the stress of which was probably a contributing factor to my subsequent psychotic break. (If <a href="/2016/Dec/anne-lawrence-is-the-only-honest-human-wip/">almost</a> <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/">everyone is lying to me</a> about autogynephilia, maybe they're <em>also</em> lying about whether humans actually need to sleep!)<br>
I made one little expression of suicidal ideation and my mom got scared<br>
And called the cops, resulting in my being kidnapped by strange men who threw me in a prison/kindergarten that everyone bizarrely insists on calling a "psychiatric hospital", where I continued to have psychosis-fueled insights into the ubiquity of deception in human social life, the anthropic and decision-theoretic implications of the <a href="http://www.simulation-argument.com/">simulation hypothesis</a>, and how Christianity as a memeplex is highly-optimized to exploit bugs in the human mind (<em>in Christ there is neither male nor female</em>). Now I'm taking a sabbatical from my software-engineering career to study the game theory of social epistemology and blog more about the surprising true nature of late-onset gender dysphoria in males!</p>Nothing New Under the Sun2017-03-24T18:00:00-07:002017-03-24T18:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-24:/2017/Mar/nothing-new-under-the-sun/<p>Of course, "Blanchard's" typology is subject to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy">Stigler's law of eponymy</a>.</p>
<p>No, I'm not talking about earlier Western sexologists like Robert Stoller, Magnus Hirchfield, or Blanchard's mentor Kurt Freund.</p>
<p>I'm talking about Abu Zakaria Yahya Ibn Sharaf al-Nawawī <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mukhannathun&oldid=765195263#Scholarly_analysis">writing in <em>the 13th century CE</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A <em>mukhannath</em> is the one ("male …</p></blockquote><p>Of course, "Blanchard's" typology is subject to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy">Stigler's law of eponymy</a>.</p>
<p>No, I'm not talking about earlier Western sexologists like Robert Stoller, Magnus Hirchfield, or Blanchard's mentor Kurt Freund.</p>
<p>I'm talking about Abu Zakaria Yahya Ibn Sharaf al-Nawawī <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mukhannathun&oldid=765195263#Scholarly_analysis">writing in <em>the 13th century CE</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A <em>mukhannath</em> is the one ("male") who carries in his movements, in his appearance and in his language the characteristics of a woman. There are two types; the first is the one in whom these characteristics are innate, he did not put them on by himself, and therein is no guilt, no blame and no shame, as long as he does not perform any (illicit) act or exploit it for money (prostitution <em>etc</em>.). The second type acts like a woman out of immoral purposes and he is the sinner and blameworthy.</p>
</blockquote>Smart2017-03-11T15:24:00-08:002017-03-11T15:24:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-11:/2017/Mar/smart/<p>"High-IQ educated people like to think we're <em>so smart</em>. But we're just <em>not</em>—at least not in a straightforwardly prosocial way. Any double-digit-IQ Trump voter from West Virginia could tell you that men who think they're women are delusional perverts.</p>
<p>"I know. I prefer not to <em>phrase</em> it that way …</p><p>"High-IQ educated people like to think we're <em>so smart</em>. But we're just <em>not</em>—at least not in a straightforwardly prosocial way. Any double-digit-IQ Trump voter from West Virginia could tell you that men who think they're women are delusional perverts.</p>
<p>"I know. I prefer not to <em>phrase</em> it that way, either, because like you—like everybody who matters—I think males with late-onset gender dysphoria <em>should</em> have a respected place in Society to pursue their dream if that's what makes them happy.</p>
<p>"But if you ignore the derogatory <em>style</em> of that way of <em>phrasing</em> it and just ask about the <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences/"><em>predictions</em></a> made by the mental model that generated the derogatory phrasing, 'men who think they're women are delusional perverts' is the <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/autogynephilia/"><em>correct theory</em></a>! If <em>really smart</em> people who are <em>really good</em> at philosophy can't get this <em>really easy</em> question right because saying the right answer out loud in clear language <em>makes us look bad</em>—what are we good for? Why should people who aren't <em>already</em> ideologically allied with us <em>care</em>?"</p>"Synthesis"2017-03-08T17:29:00-08:002017-03-08T17:29:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-08:/2017/Mar/synthesis/<p><em>I want to be a synthesis<br>
Whimsical, passionate, liberal-arts feminist<br>
I'll be a synthesis<br>
Hard-headed serious reductionistic scientist<br>
A synthesis<br>
Free our markets with the power of the collective heart!</em></p>
<p><a href="/images/synthesis.png"><img src="/images/synthesis.png" alt="sheet music" width="600" height="537"></a></p>Cachebusters2017-03-04T16:26:00-08:002017-03-04T16:26:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-04:/2017/Mar/cachebusters/<p>"So, I <em>agree</em> that there's a potential for public discussion of certain theories in psychology to have harmful social consequences, and I agree that we should take that into account when deciding whether to discuss something publicly.</p>
<p>"However, I also think it's important to be <em>specific</em> about the putatively-harmful social …</p><p>"So, I <em>agree</em> that there's a potential for public discussion of certain theories in psychology to have harmful social consequences, and I agree that we should take that into account when deciding whether to discuss something publicly.</p>
<p>"However, I also think it's important to be <em>specific</em> about the putatively-harmful social consequences you're afraid of, rather than just accepting the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/">Blue Tribe's</a> <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/">cached thought</a> that all discussion of group differences is <em>ipso facto</em> harmful.</p>
<p>"If the <em>specific</em> thing you're worried about is something like, 'Well, maybe the Red Tribe will win an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_elections,_2016">election</a> and then they'll use their power to do <em>bad things</em>,' well, guess what? It's <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_in_America">morning in America</a>, motherfuckers!</em>"</p>Interlude II2017-03-02T19:48:00-08:002017-03-02T19:48:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-02:/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/<p>"What's <em>wrong</em> with you?! Why are you <em>doing</em> this?!" screamed Alexa. "It's like you've been <em>possessed</em> by a Nazi ghost."</p>
<p>"I'm sorry," said Mark. "I'm not sure if this will make sense to you, but I'm thinking of it as playing <em>DEFECT</em> against trans women—I genuinely regret that part …</p><p>"What's <em>wrong</em> with you?! Why are you <em>doing</em> this?!" screamed Alexa. "It's like you've been <em>possessed</em> by a Nazi ghost."</p>
<p>"I'm sorry," said Mark. "I'm not sure if this will make sense to you, but I'm thinking of it as playing <em>DEFECT</em> against trans women—I genuinely regret that part and I'd be grateful if you could tell me if there's anything I can do to make it up to you-all collectively—in exchange for being able to <em>DEFECT</em> against the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus, to <em>COOPERATE</em> with closeted TERFy women who don't want people like me in their bathrooms but are too scared to say so out loud and might reward AGP males who say it for them with sex and intimacy, and—most importantly of all—to tell the truth about the beautiful feeling at the center of my life that has shaped me more than almost anything else. This is just too good of a deal for me to refuse unless it means literal physical violence or poverty."</p>
<p>"<em>What?!</em>"</p>
<p>"Oh! I get it! I shouldn't have said that last part, because that creates an incentive for powerful people being controlled by the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus to threaten me with literal physical violence or poverty after I blog a dramatization of this conversation. What I <em>should</em> have said was, 'This is just too good of a deal for me to refuse, full stop.' Except I'm <em>really bad</em> at lying. So maybe I should just trust that my friends—well, <a href="/2017/Jan/the-counter/">what's left of them when this is over</a>—the police, my savings, and my programming skills are altogether enough to keep me safe and happy."</p>Interlude I2017-03-01T18:56:00-08:002017-03-01T18:56:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-03-01:/2017/Mar/interlude-i/<p>"I continue to be loudly upset that people mostly use language to manipulate social reality rather than describe actual reality!"</p>
<p>"Have you considered ... using language to manipulate social reality to incentivize people to use language to describe actual reality?"</p>
<p>"What?! You can't do that!"</p>
<p>"Why not?"</p>
<p>"Because that's a good …</p><p>"I continue to be loudly upset that people mostly use language to manipulate social reality rather than describe actual reality!"</p>
<p>"Have you considered ... using language to manipulate social reality to incentivize people to use language to describe actual reality?"</p>
<p>"What?! You can't do that!"</p>
<p>"Why not?"</p>
<p>"Because that's a good idea that you had that I didn't have! <em>I'm</em> supposed to be the idea girl!"</p>
<p>"That doesn't make any sense! You're not even a girl!"</p>
<p>"Shut up!"</p>If Other Fantasies Were Treated Like Crossdreaming2017-02-08T19:28:00-08:002017-02-08T19:28:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-02-08:/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/<p>"Ever since I was a child, I've always dreamed of being an astronaut. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons including but not limited to my poor eyesight and distaste for formal schooling, my life took a different path. I still like to indulge the fantasy as much as I …</p><p>"Ever since I was a child, I've always dreamed of being an astronaut. Unfortunately, due to a number of reasons including but not limited to my poor eyesight and distaste for formal schooling, my life took a different path. I still like to indulge the fantasy as much as I can—attending space camp, dressing up in the realistic space suit that I bought, reading and writing erotic fiction about ordinary people being kidnapped and forced to become astronauts—but sadly, given the enormous costs of actually pursuing astronaut training, it doesn't look like I'll get the chance to fulfill my dream—barring unforeseen advances in spaceflight technology that drastically lower the costs of becoming an astronaut, of course—and I am gracefully resigned to this reality."</p>
<p>"Well, <em>I</em> think you <em>literally are</em> an astronaut and <em>always have been</em>!"</p>
<p>"Um. Thank you? But I've never been to space."</p>
<p>"Oh, well, you're not a <em>cis</em> astronaut. But trans astronauts <em>are</em> astronauts! Anyone who asks questions about the detailed truth conditions of this statement will be socially punished!"</p>A Beacon Through the Darkness; Or, Getting It Right the First Time2017-02-05T21:28:00-08:002017-02-05T21:28:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-02-05:/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/<p>On 6 August 2006 (I was eighteen years old), while browsing <em>Wikipedia</em> (likely <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology&oldid=66803255">the 31 July revision</a> of what is now the "Blanchard's transsexualism typology" article?), I came across the word <em>autogynephilia</em> for the first time, and immediately recognized that <em>this was the word; this was the word for my …</em></p><p>On 6 August 2006 (I was eighteen years old), while browsing <em>Wikipedia</em> (likely <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology&oldid=66803255">the 31 July revision</a> of what is now the "Blanchard's transsexualism typology" article?), I came across the word <em>autogynephilia</em> for the first time, and immediately recognized that <em>this was the word; this was the word for my thing</em>.</p>
<p>I didn't <em>know</em> it was supposed to be controversial, and was actually surprised that it had been coined in the context of a theory of transsexualism; I had never had any <em>reason</em> to come up with any ludicrous rationalizations that I was somehow <em>literally</em> a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.</p>
<p>I wrote in my notebook:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>THERE'S A WORD FOR IT. <em>There's a word for it.</em> I don't know whether to be happy that there's an adjective for what I have, or sad that other men have it, & that it's not mine, & only mine. Bless Wikipedia for showing me [...] But still, after all emotions have fitted themselves away, there is the word. "Autogynephilia." So simple; I know all the foreign roots; I should have thought of it. "Autogynephilic." That's what I am.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img alt="notebook: THERE'S A WORD FOR IT ..." src="/images/getting_it_right_1.png"></p>
<p>And:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Scarcity is a <em>metaphysical</em> fact, so why am I hurt when my word (which I didn't invent & only discovered a few hours ago) has so many connotations attached to it that I don't like? The dictionary definition is perfect for me, but all the exposition after that has to do with transsexualism, which annoys me, although thinking of it now, I suppose it would seem to be a logical extension to some. I'm autogynephilic <em>without</em> being gender-dysphoric—<em>or am I?</em> <em>If</em> transitioning cheap & fast & painless & perfect—wouldn't I at least be tempted? What I can't stand is transsexuals who want to express the man/woman they "truly are inside"—because I don't think there's any such thing. It <em>has</em> to be about sex—because gender shouldn't exist.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img alt="notebook: so why am I hurt when my word ..." src="/images/getting_it_right_2.png"></p>
<p><img alt="notebook: that I don't like ..." src="/images/getting_it_right_3.png"></p>
<p><a id="views-have-changed"></a>My views on gender have changed a <em>lot</em> over the past ten years—most notably, I'm not a psychological sex differences denialist anymore, so I'm afraid I can no longer endorse that "gender shouldn't exist" stance. (Given that sex differences exist and people aren't going to <em>pretend not to notice</em>, social-role defaults are inevitably going to accrete around them.)</p>
<p>The funny part is that, in retrospect, it looks like a lot of the appeal to me of psychological sex differences denialism—besides its being ideologically fashionable—was an autogynephilia-inspired rationalization: <em>I didn't want to believe that girls were a different thing that I didn't understand</em>. (This theme is very explicit in my writings at the time. In the same notebook, I wrote: "Heterosexuality should already imply antisexism, as people don't generally want to slander their lovers.") And the "woman I truly am inside" gender-identity narrative that I so disdained <em>also</em> looks like an autogynephilia-inspired rationalization, on the part of autogynephilic males (perhaps growing up in a less egalitarianist memetic environment than me) who took the <em>other</em> route, of successfully deluding themselves into believing that they themselves are feminine, rather than my route of successfully deluding myself into believing that femininity isn't a real thing. (Contrast to androphilic "true" transsexuals who have just been really feminine their entire lives and don't need any delusions to justify their desire to be women.)</p>
<p>Still, despite everything I've learned in the past decade, what's striking—at least, striking in contrast to the <em>utter raving lunacy</em> I see trotted about around me in the name of transgender rights—is how much I got <em>right</em> even then. I've had these desires since puberty, and have grown to cherish them, to let the fantasy shape my morals and ambitions. I didn't think it would be wrong to do something about it, if the costs and benefits added up. But I never took the fantasy literally, let alone expected the rest of the world to take it literally. </p>
<p>Ten years later, this still seems like the only sane approach.</p>You Probably Haven't Heard of Them2017-01-31T17:58:00-08:002017-01-31T17:58:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-31:/2017/Jan/you-probably-havent-heard-of-them/<p>"Hey Mark, a bunch of us are going to a concert tomorrow night: the Holograms are headlining at the Rose Garden, and I have an extra ticket. You want in?" offered Caleb.</p>
<p>"Maybe ..." said Mark. "Who's the opening act?"</p>
<p>"Let me check," said Caleb, fiddling with his phone. "Geez, that's …</p><p>"Hey Mark, a bunch of us are going to a concert tomorrow night: the Holograms are headlining at the Rose Garden, and I have an extra ticket. You want in?" offered Caleb.</p>
<p>"Maybe ..." said Mark. "Who's the opening act?"</p>
<p>"Let me check," said Caleb, fiddling with his phone. "Geez, that's a weird band name."</p>
<p>"Who is it?"</p>
<p>"It says, 'Late-Onset Gender Dysphoria in Males Is Not an Intersex Condition, You Lying Bastards'."</p>
<p>"I'm in!"</p>Hormones Day 332017-01-29T19:09:00-08:002017-01-29T19:09:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-29:/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/<p><img alt="used Climara patches" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/patches_02.jpg"></p>
<p>I wish I were more self-aware. People tell me caffiene is a stimulant, and I believe them, but I tend to doubt if I could <em>tell</em>, double-blind, from the inside, whether an iced-coffee I just drank was decaf or not.</p>
<p>Similarly, I applied my sixth patch today and <em>should</em> have …</p><p><img alt="used Climara patches" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/patches_02.jpg"></p>
<p>I wish I were more self-aware. People tell me caffiene is a stimulant, and I believe them, but I tend to doubt if I could <em>tell</em>, double-blind, from the inside, whether an iced-coffee I just drank was decaf or not.</p>
<p>Similarly, I applied my sixth patch today and <em>should</em> have had elevated estrogen levels in my system for a <em>month</em> now, but don't seem noticeably more female-like or otherwise effected in any easily-discernible way. Are there some kind of measurements I should be taking in order to pick up on subtle changes? (Bust size?) I guess I got a little teary a few times in the past week or so, which hasn't been common for me in recent years? (I used to cry a <em>lot</em> when I was younger.)</p>
<p>My dayjob performance has been utterly abysmal because I've been too upset to think about code, instead continuing to hyperfocus on how (<a href="/2016/Dec/anne-lawrence-is-the-only-honest-human-wip/">virtually</a>) <a href="/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/"><em>everyone has been lying to me</em></a> about <em>the most important thing in my life</em> for <em>ten years</em>, but I don't want to attribute that to the patch, because I've kind of been doing that more-or-less continuously for the past six months.</p>
<p>Again, none of this is very surprising on a starter dose with no spiro. That's fine. This is <a href="/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/">known to be a slippery slope</a>, best explored slowly and carefully if at all.</p>Revised Taxonomy2017-01-28T17:02:00-08:002017-01-28T17:02:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-28:/2017/Jan/revised-taxonomy/<p>"No, it turns out that there are actually <em>three</em> types of male-to-female transsexualism: effeminate homosexuality, autogynephilia, and—by far the most common—the third type that we made up in order to keep our jobs."
<!-- XXX spacing -->
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>And Yet None More Blameable2017-01-28T11:12:00-08:002017-01-28T11:12:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-28:/2017/Jan/and-yet-none-more-blameable/<p>Anne Fausto-Sterling, <em>Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men</em>, Ch. 1, "Introduction: the Biological Connection":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the end, the resolution of such controversy often depends upon one's standard of proof, a standard dictated in turn by political beliefs. I impose the highest standards of proof, for example, on …</p></blockquote><p>Anne Fausto-Sterling, <em>Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men</em>, Ch. 1, "Introduction: the Biological Connection":</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the end, the resolution of such controversy often depends upon one's standard of proof, a standard dictated in turn by political beliefs. I impose the highest standards of proof, for example, on claims about biological inequality, my high standards stemming directly from my philosophical and political beliefs in equality. On the other hand, given the same claims, a scientist happier with present-day social arrangements would no doubt be satisfied with weaker proof. How much and how strong the proof one demands before accepting a conclusion is a matter of judgment, a judgment that is embedded in the fabric of one's individual belief system.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a id="goldberg"></a>S. Goldberg, <em>Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance</em> (the previous edition of which was titled <em>The Inevitability of Patriarchy</em> (!!)), Introduction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[T]he relevant point here is that the consequences of an acceptance of an empirical explanation have nothing to do with the correctness of that explanation. This is so obvious that for thousands of years the attempt to refute an explanation by citing the (putative) bad effects of an acceptance of that explanation has been recognized as fallacious. Even if acceptance of the belief that the world is round somehow threatened our species' survival, that would not make the earth flat. Truth is independent of consequences.</p>
<p>[...]</p>
<p>To readers who come to this book prepared to think for themselves and to listen to reasoned argument: I hope you find this trip illuminating and enjoyable and remember that nothing here commits you to any moral or political view that you do not like.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I just <em>hate hate hate</em> it when people saying the good things turn out to be <em>bad</em> at epistemology, and people who are <em>good</em> at epistemology turn out to say the bad things. If it happens too often, it's <em>almost</em> enough to make you wonder whether <em>some</em> of the bad things are <em>actually true</em> (!?!).</p>The Map Is Not the Territory2017-01-27T18:07:00-08:002017-01-27T18:07:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-27:/2017/Jan/the-map-is-not-the-territory/<p>"... a sex-fueled mental illness made up by Ray Blanchard—" said Alexa.</p>
<p>"A sex-fueled mental illness <em>named</em> by Ray Blanchard," interjected Mark.
<!-- XXX spacing -->
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>From What I've Tasted of Desire2017-01-24T22:48:00-08:002017-01-24T22:48:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-24:/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/<blockquote>
<p><em>Oh, we have to get this right<br>
Yes, we have to make them see</em> </p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kESi3hksPg0">"Ballad of the Crystal Empire"</a>, <em>My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>(Epistemic status: somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also far more plausible than it has any right to be. Assumes the correctness of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard's_transsexualism_typology">Blanchard's transsexualism typology</a> without arguing …</em></p><blockquote>
<p><em>Oh, we have to get this right<br>
Yes, we have to make them see</em> </p>
<p>—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kESi3hksPg0">"Ballad of the Crystal Empire"</a>, <em>My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>(Epistemic status: somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also far more plausible than it has any right to be. Assumes the correctness of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard's_transsexualism_typology">Blanchard's transsexualism typology</a> without arguing it here.)</em></p>
<p>So, not a lot of people understand this, but the end of the world is, in fact, nigh. <em>Conditional</em> on civilization not collapsing (which is itself a <em>kind</em> of end of the world), sometime in the next century or so, someone is going to invent better-than-human artificial general intelligence. And from that point on, humans are not really in control of what happens in this planet's future light cone.</p>
<p>This is a counterintuitive point. It's tempting to think that you could program the AI to just obey orders ("Write an adventure novel for my daughter's birthday", "Output the design of a nanofactory") and not otherwise intervene in (or take over) the universe. And maybe <a href="https://arbital.com/p/genie/">something like that</a> could be made to work, but it's <em>much</em> harder than it looks.</p>
<p>Our simple framework for benchmarking how intelligence has to work is <em>expected utility maximization</em>: model the world, use your model to compute a probability distribution over outcomes conditional on choosing to perform an action for some set of actions, and then perform the action with the highest expected utility with respect to your utility function (a mapping from outcomes to ℝ). Any agent that behaves in a way that can't be shoved into this framework is in violation of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Morgenstern_utility_theorem">von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms</a>, which look so "reasonable" that <a href="https://selfawaresystems.com/2007/11/30/paper-on-the-basic-ai-drives/">we expect any "reasonable" agent to self-modify</a> to be in harmony with them.</p>
<p>So as AIs get more and more general, more like agents capable of autonomously solving new problems rather than unusually clever-looking ordinary computer programs, we should expect them to look more and more like expected utility maximizers, optimizing the universe with respect to some internal value criterion.</p>
<p>But humans are <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/l3/thou_art_godshatter/">a mess of conflicting desires</a> inherited from our evolutionary and sociocultural history; we don't <em>have</em> a utility function written down anywhere that we can just put in the AI. So if the systems that ultimately run the world end up with a utility function that's <em>not</em> in the incredibly specific class of those we would have wanted if we knew how to translate everything humans want or would-want into a utility function, then the machines disassemble us for spare atoms and tile the universe with <em>something else</em>. There's no <em>reason</em> for them to protect human life or forms of life that we would find valuable unless we specifically <em>code that in</em>.</p>
<p>This looks like a hard problem. This looks like a <em>really</em> hard problem with <em>unimaginably</em> high stakes: once the handoff of control of our civilization from humans to machines happens, we don't get a second chance to do it over. The ultimate fate of the human species rests on the competence of the AI research community: the inferential power and discipline to <em>cut through to the correct answer</em> and <em>bet the world on it</em>, rather than clinging to one's favorite pet hypothesis and leaving science to advance funeral by funeral.</p>
<p>Stereotypically at least, computer programming is <em>the</em> quintessential profession of autogynephilic trans women, although it's unclear how much of this is inherent to the work (a correlation between erotic target location erroneousness and general nerdiness) and how much is just a selection effect (well-to-do programmers with non-customer-facing jobs in Silicon Valley can afford to take the "publicly decide that this is my True Gender Identity" trajectory, whereas businessmen, lawyers, and poor people are trapped in the "secret, shameful crossdressing/dreaming" trajectory). </p>
<p>Thus, the bad <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/u/the_ethic_of_handwashing_and_community_epistemic/">epistemic hygiene</a> habits of the trans community that are required to maintain the socially-acceptable alibi that transitioning is about expressing some innate "gender identity", are necessarily spread to the computer science community, as an <a href="https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15">intransigent minority</a> of trans activist-types successfully enforce social norms mandating that everyone must <em>pretend not to notice</em> that trans women are eccentric men. With social reality placing such tight constraints on perception of actual reality, our chances of developing the advanced epistemology needed to rise to the occasion of solving the alignment problem seem slim at best. (If we can't put our weight down on the right answer to a <em>really easy</em> scientific question like the two-type taxonomy of MtF—which lots of people <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do/">just <em>notice</em></a> without having to do careful research—then what hope do we have for hard problems?)</p>
<p>Essentially, we may be living in a scenario where the world is <em>literally destroyed specifically because no one wants to talk about their masturbation fantasies</em>.</p>Sex and Gender2017-01-23T20:36:00-08:002017-01-23T20:36:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-23:/2017/Jan/sex-and-gender/<p>(To the tune of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtS46Wfsxnw">"Love and Marriage."</a>)</p>
<p><em>Sex and gender<br>
Sex and gender<br>
A disaster like a fender-bender<br>
The latter tends to smother<br>
But you can't have one without the other!</em></p>
<p><em>Try, try, try to separate them<br>
It's an illusion<br>
Try, try, try and you will only come<br>
To this …</em></p><p>(To the tune of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtS46Wfsxnw">"Love and Marriage."</a>)</p>
<p><em>Sex and gender<br>
Sex and gender<br>
A disaster like a fender-bender<br>
The latter tends to smother<br>
But you can't have one without the other!</em></p>
<p><em>Try, try, try to separate them<br>
It's an illusion<br>
Try, try, try and you will only come<br>
To this conclusion—</em></p>Snowman2017-01-23T18:30:00-08:002017-01-23T18:30:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-23:/2017/Jan/snowman/<p>"Don't overgeneralize!" said Brian. "You <em>of all people</em> should know that everyone is a unique and special snowflake with the liberty to define and express their identity."</p>
<p>"<em>You</em> shouldn't <em>under</em>generalize!" retorted Taylor. "Can't you <em>see the pattern</em>? The <em>entire transfeminine spectrum</em>—we're just manifestations—shadows, projections—of the <em>same …</em></p><p>"Don't overgeneralize!" said Brian. "You <em>of all people</em> should know that everyone is a unique and special snowflake with the liberty to define and express their identity."</p>
<p>"<em>You</em> shouldn't <em>under</em>generalize!" retorted Taylor. "Can't you <em>see the pattern</em>? The <em>entire transfeminine spectrum</em>—we're just manifestations—shadows, projections—of the <em>same snowflake</em> in various states of contingent self-delusion."</p>I'm Sick of Being Lied To2017-01-21T19:08:00-08:002017-01-21T19:08:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-21:/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/<blockquote>
<p>I said, "How do you lie about the world? And how do you make yourself believe it? How can you see the whole truth, <em>know the whole truth</em> ... and go on pretending that none of it matters? What's the secret? What's the trick? <em>What's the magic?</em>"</p>
<p>My face was already …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>I said, "How do you lie about the world? And how do you make yourself believe it? How can you see the whole truth, <em>know the whole truth</em> ... and go on pretending that none of it matters? What's the secret? What's the trick? <em>What's the magic?</em>"</p>
<p>My face was already burning white hot, but I leaned forward, hoping that her sheer radiance might infect me with her great transforming insight.</p>
<p>"I'm trying! You have to believe I'm trying!" I looked away, suddenly at a loss for words, struck dumb by the ineffable mystery of her presence. Then a cramp seized me; the thing I could no longer pretend was a demon snake constricted inside me.</p>
<p>I said, "But when the truth, the underworld, <em>the TOE</em> ... reaches up, takes you in its fist, and <em>squeezes</em> ..." I raised my own hand, meaning to demonstrate, but it was already clenched tight involuntarily. "How do you ignore it? How do you deny it? How do you go on fooling yourself that you've ever stood above it, ever pulled the strings, ever run the show?"</p>
<p>Sweat was running into my eyes, blinding me. I brushed it away with my clenched fist, laughing. "When every cell, every fucking <em>atom</em> in your body, burns the message into your skin: everything you value, everything you cherish, everything you live for ... is just the scum on the surface of a vacuum thirty-five powers of ten deep—how do you go on lying? How do you close your eyes to <em>that</em>?"</p>
<p>I waited for her answer. Solace, redemption, were within my grasp. I held my arms out toward her in supplication.</p>
<p>Walsh smiled faintly, then walked on without saying a word.</p>
<p>—<em>Distress</em> by Greg Egan</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I just can't, can't, <em>can't</em> get over the extent to which my observations while trying to talk to people about all this seem to be best explained by the hypothesis that <em>everyone is lying</em>.</p>
<p>I know, that's not psychologically plausible. Which only makes it <em>worse</em>. The sheer <em>depths</em> of denial, mendacity, and cowardice from <em>incredibly</em> smart people whom I love and otherwise respect—or <em>used</em> to respect—is just <em>staggering</em>; I <em>would not believe it</em> if I didn't see it with my own eyes.</p>
<p><em>Disagreement</em> is fine! Of course different people will read the evidence differently in the light of their own experiences and knowledge and come to different provisional conclusions.</p>
<p>And in an <em>honest</em> disagreement among truthseeking intellectuals, people say, "You're wrong, and it matters, and we should try to resolve this in public using evidence and reasoning, so that others who are interested in the topic can learn and make up their own minds."</p>
<p>And for the most part, that's just <em>not what I see</em>. Instead, people tell me, "You're wrong, <em>and</em> it doesn't matter, <em>and</em> you shouldn't be talking about this." Or, "You might be right, but it doesn't matter." Or, "This makes sense to me, but don't tell anyone I said so." Or, "I disagree, and want to privately discuss the science with you, but if you successfully change my mind, I don't want anyone to know." Or, "I think the consequentialist thing to do is not to tell anyone they're wrong about this topic until the associated political struggle is won."</p>
<p>And I'm just like, <em>what the fuck is wrong with you people?</em> How can it <em>not matter</em>?! You guys are <em>really, really</em> smart; how the <em>fuck</em> can you <em>possibly</em> get this wrong?</p>
<p>Okay, yes, politics, it would probably be very bad if the <em>general public</em> knew what was going on. But don't you at least want to understand for <em>yourselves</em>? And what's even the endgame here? The next generation of people with the trait are growing up and making important life decisions based on your <em>shitty political propaganda</em>. Do you think you can get away with lying about this <em>forever</em>?</p>
<p>People who know me can <em>tell</em> that I have the trait; there are enough of us around that people's radars are well-tuned enough to catch the eggs that haven't hit the wall yet. And they tell me, "You obviously have the trait; you should totally join the coalition!"</p>
<p>And I'm like, you <em>delusional bastards</em> have been <em>blatantly lying to me</em> about <em>the most important thing in my life</em> for <em>ten years</em>. I want <em>nothing to do</em> with your coalition.</p>
<p>Defect!</p>The Line in the Sand; Or, My Slippery Slope Anchoring Action Plan2017-01-18T22:55:00-08:002017-01-18T22:55:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-18:/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/<blockquote>
<p>We're looking for a few good men, and you've come a long way, baby. But baby—don't cross that line. Don't ever cross that line.</p>
<p>—<em>Hidden: A Gender</em> by Kate Bornstein</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, I'm facing a problem.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I really want to indulge my perverted narcissistic fantasy about …</p><blockquote>
<p>We're looking for a few good men, and you've come a long way, baby. But baby—don't cross that line. Don't ever cross that line.</p>
<p>—<em>Hidden: A Gender</em> by Kate Bornstein</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, I'm facing a problem.</p>
<p>On the one hand, I really want to indulge my perverted narcissistic fantasy about being a woman, and I'm <em>really really jealous</em> of all of the trans women friends (I still have friends!—<a href="/2017/Jan/the-counter/">for now</a>) I've made since I moved to "Portland" (quotes because it might not actually be Portland, although you should know that I would still use quotes even if it is Portland, because I'm <a href="https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity">not some kind of idiot who doesn't know information theory</a>).</p>
<p>On the other hand, I don't want to become a trans woman myself, because I already have a perfectly functional social identity as a man named "'Mark'" (two sets of quotes: one for words-as-words, and another because it might not actually be "Mark", although you should know that <em>&c.</em>) that I'm not going to throw away for the sake of my perverted narcissistic fantasy, particularly since the standard transition narrative looks so actively delusional to me that I can't possibly participate in it.</p>
<p>(Where one day, that sensitive, nerdy guy with a ponytail says, "Hey everyone, turns out I've secretly been a girl this entire time in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and no one noticed!", and everyone else is supposed to politely be like, "Oh, right, that makes sense.")</p>
<p>But transitioning isn't a binary switch; it's a whole series of interventions designed to make a man resemble a woman as much as possible: hormones <em>and</em> hair removal <em>and</em> new clothes <em>and</em> voice training <em>and</em> coming out to friends and family and coworkers <em>and</em> meeting new people as a woman <em>&c</em>. Maybe ... maybe you could take <em>some</em> interventions <em>without</em> giving up your primary social identity, as a <em>reasonable compromise</em> between the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought, and the practical realities of a world in which biological sex is a real thing that <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a><a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">we don't know how to change</a> (even if people in Portland will politely <em>pretend not to notice</em>). An autogynandromorphophilic consolation prize, when the real thing will always be out of reach, and the thing that people like to pretend is as good as the real thing looks like it would actually cause way more problems than it solves.</p>
<p>I am not the first person to have this idea.</p>
<p>Disturbingly, I have been advised that it <em>never works</em>.</p>
<p>The problem, <a href="https://transblog.grieve-smith.com/the-slippery-slope/">termed "the slippery slope"</a>, is that each intervention changes the way you evaluate further interventions. So people <em>start out</em> with <em>just</em> hormones or <em>just</em> weekend public crossdressing, saying, "Oh, I'm not actually going to <em>transition</em>; I'm just exploring my feminine side, that's all; this is just an experiment to relieve some of my dysphoria" and then two years later, the same person is like, "Oh yes, I've always literally been a woman; it just took a while for me to notice; how <em>dare</em> you suggest otherwise?!"</p>
<p>Maybe you <em>can't</em> half-transition, for the same reason you can't just have a little bit of cocaine on weekends.</p>
<p>My <em>hope</em> is that my case is different—or rather, that I can <em>make</em> my case different. I <em>expect</em> that most people go into this with a mindset of, "Well, I think I might be trans, but I'm not sure," and conclude from their enjoyment of each successive intervention in isolation that yes, they do in fact have the atomic Trans Identity and are in fact a trans woman. Whereas I'm going into this with the mindset of, "Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is <em>obviously correct</em>, the standard gender-identity narrative is <em>mendacious bullshit</em>, and everyone who says otherwise is ignorant, delusional, or lying." My hope is that if you <em>know</em> about autogynephilia and you <em>know</em> about this progression, you can set limits <em>in advance</em> about what interventions to use (and more importantly, <em>not</em> to use), and <em>stop</em> at a more profitable point on the slope.</p>
<p>Some people are really into the clothes and social aspects of presenting as a woman. That's not really much of a priority for me. (And of course, a lot of actual women don't like that stuff, either. Smash the patriarchy!) I'm more interested in finding out what I can about the physiological and psychological aspects of what biologically-female people feel, so for me, hormones are the most interesting part with the greatest potential rewards, despite their much higher risks (both social and medical) contrasted to just playing dress-up.</p>
<p>Trans women have this concept of <em>boy-mode fail</em>, where you've been on hormones for however many months, and strangers start spontaneously gendering you as female even though you think you're presenting as male. </p>
<p>I'm aiming for a "weirdly-androgynous man and occasional transvestite" outcome. Physically, try to sneak up to the edge of boy-mode fail and <em>fucking stay there</em>. (And if at any point, things feel bad or socially-awkward, don't hestiate to <em>pull the plug</em> early.)</p>
<p>So here is my schedule of interventions—</p>
<ul>
<li>Estradiol: <em>Yes</em> (<a href="/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/">already underway</a>)</li>
<li>Spironolactone: <em>Maybe</em> (conditional on results from just-estrogen)</li>
<li>Facial hair removal (laser): <em>Maybe</em> (conditional on results from E/spiro; if beard shadow makes the difference between consistently reading as "weirdly androgynous man" rather than "trans woman", I probably need to keep it)</li>
<li>Cosplaying female characters at special events (Comic-Con, Halloween, <em>&c.</em>): <em>Yes</em></li>
<li>Everything else: <em>No no no no no no no no</em></li>
</ul>
<p>Now, maybe my case <em>isn't</em> different. Maybe once you reach the boy-mode fail zone, being read as female feels <em>so right</em>, and being read as male feels <em>so wrong</em> that you say, "Forget my previous commitments; forget my moral scruples about invading women's spaces; I'm <em>going for it</em>!"</p>
<p>If that happens to me, I'll be sure to add an addendum to this post as a warning to the next guy.</p>
<p>I mean, unless I renege on that, too. You never can trust us autogynephilic males!</p>The Erotic Target Location Gift2017-01-15T18:47:00-08:002017-01-15T18:47:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-15:/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/<p>My friend "Elmer" told me about this one time our local sage "Travis" was talking about the phenomenon of men who feel guilty about being male, and Elmer suggested me as an example, whereupon Travis was like, "Ooh, good one!"</p>
<p>I think ... I think I feel less guilty now. I …</p><p>My friend "Elmer" told me about this one time our local sage "Travis" was talking about the phenomenon of men who feel guilty about being male, and Elmer suggested me as an example, whereupon Travis was like, "Ooh, good one!"</p>
<p>I think ... I think I feel less guilty now. I remember driving to Santa Cruz once, enjoying the thrill of going fast around curves, and then feeling guilty. Like, is this a guy thing? Should I stop enjoying this? (Is it sexist of me to even be considering the hypothesis that this is a guy thing?)</p>
<p>But here's the thing: my <em>desire to be female</em> was also, itself, a guy thing. If I'm allowed to enjoy and celebrate that, maybe I'm also allowed to enjoy other guy things.</p>Avatar: The Last Genderbender2017-01-15T18:24:00-08:002017-01-15T18:24:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-15:/2017/Jan/avatar-the-last-genderbender/<p>"<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTgVD1_-LK8">Male. Female. Only the Avatar</a> can master all two genders, and bring balance to the world."
<!-- XXX spacing -->
<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Hormones Day 132017-01-09T18:00:00-08:002017-01-09T18:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-09:/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/<p><img alt="used Climara patches" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/patches_01.jpg"></p>
<p>Applied my third patch in the morning today (first patch was evening of 27 December, second patch was morning of 2 January). Still don't really notice anything—even my libido seems intact. The doctor had totally been willing to prescribe spiro, too, but I had declined because it seemed prudent …</p><p><img alt="used Climara patches" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/patches_01.jpg"></p>
<p>Applied my third patch in the morning today (first patch was evening of 27 December, second patch was morning of 2 January). Still don't really notice anything—even my libido seems intact. The doctor had totally been willing to prescribe spiro, too, but I had declined because it seemed prudent to be conservative about something I'm thinking about as a gender-themed drug experiment and definitely <em>not</em> a gender transition. Should I have taken her up on it? I should be patient; developments would take time regardless.</p>Title Sequence2017-01-08T17:13:00-08:002017-01-08T17:13:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-08:/2017/Jan/title-sequence/<p>"Mark, did you <em>really</em> need to bring me here for this?" whispered Caleb.</p>
<p>"<em>Yes!</em> No one can do the Don LaFontaine voice like you! I said I owe you a favor!"</p>
<p>"Alright."</p>
<p>It was time for the Gender Queery discussion group at the Q Center to begin. The facilitator read …</p><p>"Mark, did you <em>really</em> need to bring me here for this?" whispered Caleb.</p>
<p>"<em>Yes!</em> No one can do the Don LaFontaine voice like you! I said I owe you a favor!"</p>
<p>"Alright."</p>
<p>It was time for the Gender Queery discussion group at the Q Center to begin. The facilitator read the rules (keep confidentiality, respect people's identities, use "I" statements, <em>&c.</em>), and people began to introduce themselves. A man calling himself Augustina said that he identified as a nonbinary transfeminine demigirl and that his pronouns were <em>she</em> or <em>they</em>. A woman named Laura said that she identified as fluidflux and that she took <em>they</em>/<em>them</em> pronouns.</p>
<p>When the circle got around to Mark, he kept silent as Caleb began to narrate: "Ever since puberty, he had fantasized about being more like the women he loved and admired. In a world teeming with the wonders of modern science, <em>fantasy</em> becomes <em>reality</em> ..."</p>
<p>Mark stood up and said proudly, "My name is Taylor Saotome-Westlake, my pronouns are <em>he</em>/<em>him</em>—if only becuase I don't model myself as having a choice in the matter—and as of last week, I am—" he lifted up the side of his shirt a few inches to reveal the estradiol patch, as Caleb finished:</p>
<p>"<em>The man with the nonstandard hormone balance!</em>"</p>The Counter2017-01-02T17:08:00-08:002017-01-02T17:08:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-02:/2017/Jan/the-counter/<p>It's a quarter before midnight in one of the bedrooms of a two-bedroom apartment in Beaverton. There is a small whiteboard mounted on the wall in the far right corner of the room. It says:</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><strong><span style="font-size: 115%;">FRIENDS LOST OVER THIS</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 220%;"><strong>1</strong></span></p>
</div>
<p>The lights flick on. Mark enters, walks to the corner …</p><p>It's a quarter before midnight in one of the bedrooms of a two-bedroom apartment in Beaverton. There is a small whiteboard mounted on the wall in the far right corner of the room. It says:</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><strong><span style="font-size: 115%;">FRIENDS LOST OVER THIS</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 220%;"><strong>1</strong></span></p>
</div>
<p>The lights flick on. Mark enters, walks to the corner, takes the whiteboard pen from its holder, erases the <em>1</em> with his right hand, and writes a <em>2</em> in its place.</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<p><strong><span style="font-size: 115%;">FRIENDS LOST OVER THIS</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 220%;"><strong>2</strong></span></p>
</div>
<p>He flops down on the bed, and wonders if he should want to be able to cry.</p>
<p>Maybe he would be able to cry if the breakup had been more dramatic. He imagines that among normal people, losing a friend over a political or scientific argument (do normal people have scientific arguments?) usually involves some kind of vicious fight ("Trans women are men!" "Die, TERF scum!").</p>
<p>Mark's social circle is far too civilized for that. Everyone wants to embody the spirit of <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200608154604/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/">niceness, community, and civilization</a>—and everyone knows game theory, so even if you're <em>not</em> disposed to be nice, if you can <em>predict</em> the outcome of a conflict, you can just implement that outcome directly without the costs of actually having to fight. </p>
<p>So people cut ties peacefully. No vicious fights, no ill will. Just, <em>I like you and you haven't done anything wrong, but your vindictive attitude around this issue, while understandable, makes talking to you feel vaguely aversive to me; I don't want to hang out with you anymore.</em> And, <em>Okay, that's disappointing, but I understand; I like you, too.</em></p>
<p>Maybe he would be able to cry if he had been less conservative about the drug experiment. He sits up, lifts up his shirt, and examines the transdermal patch on his left abdomen. The patch is transparent, but clearly delineated by a ring of grime where the adhesive at the edges of the patch hasn't bonded firmly with the skin, letting dust accumulate on the thin ring of exposed adhesive on the skin and the underside of the edges. Silver lettering in the center says:</p>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Climara®<br/>
(estradiol)<br/>
0.05 mg/day
</div>
<p>It's a low dose, particularly without an accompanying anti-androgen, and it's only been on a few days, so it's not at all surprising that Mark doesn't think he's noticed any effects yet. He has been moody today, but it's more of an angry-hit-things moodiness rather than a weepy moodiness—hence the slightly-too-aggressive instant message that led to the counter being incremented—so he figures that it's either unrelated to the patch, or that the effects of tinkering with real-world biochemistry are actually more complicated than one might crudely predict from simplistic, dehumanizing gender stereotypes.</p>
<p>Mark looks at the whiteboard and wonders how much higher the counter will go. Was it worth it? Does it matter if <em>everyone else</em> is lying, if he thinks he understands the situation for himself?</p>
<p>Still lacking any real tears, he imitates a sob. He has a lot of writing to do.</p>If the Gay Community Were Like the Trans Community2017-01-01T08:31:00-08:002017-01-01T08:31:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2017-01-01:/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/<p>"I have something important to tell you. About myself."</p>
<p>"Go on. I'm your friend. Whatever it is, you can tell me, and I'll support you."</p>
<p>"I'm ... I'm a homosexual."</p>
<p>"That's not real."</p>
<p>"What?"</p>
<p>"Yeah, back in the eighties some bigoted Canadian psychologist made up this theory of so-called <em>homosexuality</em>, but …</p><p>"I have something important to tell you. About myself."</p>
<p>"Go on. I'm your friend. Whatever it is, you can tell me, and I'll support you."</p>
<p>"I'm ... I'm a homosexual."</p>
<p>"That's not real."</p>
<p>"What?"</p>
<p>"Yeah, back in the eighties some bigoted Canadian psychologist made up this theory of so-called <em>homosexuality</em>, but it's been thoroughly debunked. You can't be a homosexual, because homosexuality doesn't exist. You're clearly just gay."</p>
<p>"... uh. O-kay. Um. So, what does being gay consist of, in your view?"</p>
<p>"You know, speaking in a lisp, liking fashion, being in intimate relationships with other men—"</p>
<p>"Right! Okay! Stop there! So, that part about being in intimate relationships with other men. Why do you think gay guys do that?"</p>
<p>"Why, they're expressing their identities as gay men, of course."</p>
<p>"They're ... expressing their identities."</p>
<p>"Yes."</p>
<p>"And what does an 'identity' consist of, exactly?"</p>
<p>"I'm not sure I know what you mean."</p>
<p>"I guess what I'm trying to say is, that, um. I think the <em>reason</em> gay men form intimate relationships with other men is, um, related to their sexuality."</p>
<p>"Oh, of course! But that's a mere <em>effect</em> of their gay identities! Surely you're not claiming that gay men are gay <em>because</em> they're sexually attracted to men."</p>
<p>"Um. Actually, I am saying that."</p>
<p>"What? How <em>dare</em> you <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">invalidate people's identities</a> like that?! Why, you're not gay at all! You're just some kind of pervert with a fetish for men! Well, I'm sorry, I can tolerate anything except intolerance—we are no longer friends!"</p>
<p>"But—"</p>
<p>"Get away from me, you bigot!"</p>
<p>"But, but—"</p>
<p>"Hate speech! Someone call the police! <em>Hate speeeeeech!</em>"</p>"Anne Lawrence Is the Only Honest Human" (work in progress)2016-12-31T10:51:00-08:002016-12-31T10:51:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-12-31:/2016/Dec/anne-lawrence-is-the-only-honest-human-wip/<p><em>Anne Lawrence is the only honest human<br>
Though the world may disagree!<br>
And<br>
Anne Lawrence shines a beacon through the darkness<br>
Of you motherfuckers lying to me!</em> </p>
<p><a href="/images/anne_lawrence_is_the_only_honest_human_wip01.png"><img src="/images/anne_lawrence_is_the_only_honest_human_wip01.png" alt="sheet music" width="600" height="328"></a></p>Joined2016-12-19T22:17:00-08:002016-12-19T22:17:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-12-19:/2016/Dec/joined/<p><em>(This post was originally published elsewhere, and has been retroactively cross-posted, with slight edits, to the</em> Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought <em>archives.)</em></p>
<p>The morning of Thursday the eighth, before heading off to see the new LCSW at the multi-specialty clinic, I was idly rereading some of the early <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/"><em>Closetspace</em></a> strips …</p><p><em>(This post was originally published elsewhere, and has been retroactively cross-posted, with slight edits, to the</em> Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought <em>archives.)</em></p>
<p>The morning of Thursday the eighth, before heading off to see the new LCSW at the multi-specialty clinic, I was idly rereading some of the early <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/"><em>Closetspace</em></a> strips, trying to read between the lines (as it were) using the enhanced perception granted by the world-shattering insight about how everything I've cared about for the past fourteen years turns out to be related in unexpected and terrifying ways that I can't talk about because I don't want to lose my cushy psychology professorship at Northwestern University. (<a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/24.htm">Victoria tells Carrie</a>, "Not to mention you don't <em>think</em> like one of 'them'"; ha ha, I wonder what <em>that</em> means!) When I got to <a href="http://www.dolari.org/cs/43.htm">the part where Carrie chooses a Maj. Kira costume</a> to wear to the sci-fi convention, it occured to me that in addition to <a href="/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/">having the exactly the right body type to cosplay Pearl from <em>Obnoxious Bad Decision Child</em></a>, I <em>also</em> have exactly the right body type to cosplay Jadzia Dax from <em>Star Trek: Deep Space Nine</em>, on account of my being tall—well, actually I'm an inch shorter than Terry Farrell—thin, white, and having a dark ponytail.</p>
<p>Okay, not <em>exactly</em> the right body type. You know what I mean.</p>
<p><a href="/images/dax.jpg"><img src="/images/dax.jpg" width="240" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a></p>
<p>So I ordered some cheapo Sciences-division <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M056DXO/">uniform pajamas</a>, thinking of going to some comics convention next year, but when I queried the Overmind in its gopher aspect for actual <em>Star Trek</em> conventions, it turned out that there was one <em>that very weekend</em> in the area. Online ticket sales had stopped, but allegedly "[a]vailable tickets [would] be on sale at the convention", and there was still time to upgrade my uniform order to one-day shipping.</p>
<p>The uniform I got (just the first suitable thing I found querying the Overmind in its Amazonian aspect; it would be possible to do better for more searching and money and shipping time) was problematic in that it's the <a href="http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2360s-early_2370s)"><em>TNG</em>-era design</a> <em>and</em> has commander's rank pips, whereas Jadzia was a lieutenant when she last wore a <em>TNG</em>-era uniform and (spoilers!) <a href="http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Tears_of_the_Prophets_(episode)">died</a> in 2374 as a lieutenant commander. I considered trying to play a post-series Dax who actually faked her own death (and got Dr. Bashir to use an experimental technique to copy the Dax symbiont's memories to Ezri Tigan), then later got promoted to commander and assigned to a different post where they still wear the <em>TNG</em>-era uniforms for some reason. But I decided that it would be simpler to just cover the third pip with electrical tape and play Lt. Dax in 2369, just before her reassignment to Deep Space Nine. (Beyond body type, at 28, I'm even just the right <em>age</em> for this role, Jadzia having been born in 2341!)</p>
<p>(Aside: before considering the question of "who do I have the correct body type to cosplay", I had always thought that I liked/identified-with—my brain may not distinguish the two concepts as sharply as some do—Kira more than Dax, but that doesn't really make any sense: Dax, the cosmopolitan science officer whose ambition spans worlds and bodies, is far more like what I'm supposed to be than Kira, the ex-terrorist XO whose life has been structured by the struggle to defend her homeworld from Cardassian imperialism. Kira Nerys says that she trusts the wisdom of the Prophets; Jadzia Dax quietly wonders what those wormhole aliens are really up to.)</p>
<p>During the next few days, I watched <a href="http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Soldiers_of_the_Empire_%28episode%29">"Soldiers of the Empire"</a> (<a href="http://www.trekbbs.com/threads/soldiers-of-the-empire-the-best-dax-episode.263482/">recommended as the best Dax episode</a> by TrekBBS user "Bad Thoughts" in the at-the-time top <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=best+dax+episode&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8">search result for <em>best dax episode</em> returned by the Overmind in its gopher aspect</a>) to help get into character and bought some cosmetics at Walgreens: Loréal 201 Classic Ivory "infallible pro-glow" SPF 15 foundation, Maybelline Line Stiletto "ultimate precision" liquid eyeliner (liquid eyeliner being <a href="http://www.secondhandsuperhero.com/2011/09/last-minute-trill-costume.html">recommended by Stephanie as the kind of makeup with which to draw Trill spots</a>), a Loréal Brunnette brow stylist definer pencil in case that turned out to be better than the eyeliner for drawing spots (it wasn't), and a stick of Maybelline 680 Mesmerizing Magenta lipstick.</p>
<p>(I couldn't find the liquid eyeliner myself and had to ask a store employee. She asked if there was any particular brand I wanted. "No," I said, just a eyelash hair too forcefully, "this isn't my usual area of expertise.")</p>
<p>So I got up early the morning of Sunday the eleventh, shaved, applied the makeup in my <em>inexpert</em>-would-almost-be-too-charitable way (smear on foundation, haphazardly dab eyeliner on sides of face to make Trill spots, waveringly bring lipstick to lips), put on a bra and my foam breastforms under the cheapo uniform top, and used <a href="http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/galaxy-s7-features-and-specs/">my PADD</a> to <a href="https://www.uber.com/">summon a taxi</a> to the hotel hosting the convention.</p>
<p>I arrived way too early for check-in, and walked up the road (wearing my black jacket over my uniform top) to a different hotel that had an outpost of the raktajino hegemon, and ordered a breakfast sandwich and the <a href="https://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/brewed-coffee/vanilla-sweet-cream-cold-brew">vanilla sweet-cream iced raktajino specialty medicinal</a>. I gave my name as <em>Jadzia</em>, but the barista wrote <em>Jetsy</em> on the cup. (Maybe my voice was a little shaky, but <em>maybe</em> she needed to recalibrate her <a href="http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/11/still-yet-another-idle-wish-for-a-future-star-trek-series/">universal translator</a>.)</p>
<p>A little bit of lipstick rubbed off on the sandwich and the straw.</p>
<p><a id="reading-the-janet-mock-autobiography"></a>At the convention hotel, I waited in the lobby for a while, still with the jacket over my uniform, reading the Janet Mock autobiography on my PADD, until it was time to check in. After buying my Sunday wristband ($70), I wandered over to the photo-op/autograph ticketing table and bought a ticket to get a photo with Michael Dorn at 11:10 ($40). (Nana Visitor or Terry Farrell herself would have been my first choices for a celebrity photo, but they weren't there that day.)</p>
<p>There was still a lot of time to hang out before the theater opened for the actual convention programming, but that was fine, because actual convention programming is kind of boring; the actual point of conventions is to have an excuse to dress up and wander around and talk to people and get vanity photos of other people who are using the convention as an excuse to dress up.</p>
<p>A woman in the vendor hall asked me how I did my spots.</p>
<p>"This is my natural skin pigmentation," I said.</p>
<p>"Oh," she said, confused.</p>
<p>I leaned towards her and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "<em>I'm not supposed to break character today! It's liquid eyeliner.</em>"</p>
<p>One man was wearing a particularly impressive Klingon costume. "I think I recognize you!" I said, stopping him. "I think Curzon knew you!"</p>
<p>"Curzon?"</p>
<p>"My previous host," I explained. "Can we get a photo?"</p>
<p>He seemed to regard me with bemused toleration as we posed for a selfie taken with my PADD.</p>
<p>"Those real?" he asked, referring to my breasts.</p>
<p>"No, I'm actually a guy," I said. "Obviously."</p>
<p>"I know," he said.</p>
<p>I sat through some actual convention programming. John de Lancie is almost as entertaining playing himself as he is as Q or Discord. In response to a question from an aspiring actor, de Lancie said that TV and movie acting is all about what you can do <em>now</em>, in contrast to theater, where young talent can be afforded time to develop under the tutelage of a director. He mentioned that <a href="http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Alarak">Alarak</a>, the character he voice-acted for <em>Starcraft</em>, was angry all the time, and that he imagined there should be a scene featuring Alarak relaxing by painting watercolor. He told the story (which I had already heard before, probably at BABSCon) of voicing Discord for <em>Friendship Is Magic</em> with minimal preparation and forgetting about the matter entirely until some months later, when he woke up to see his inbox exploding with fan mail for his part in something called "<em>My Little Pony</em>" ... and the correspondents were <em>not</em> little girls.</p>
<p>After de Lancie, there was a discussion with some writer-folk (the schedule <em>said</em> the topic would be the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Discovery">new series next year</a>, but they didn't seem to know anything about it), and soon enough, it was time for my photo op with Michael Dorn.</p>
<p><a id="photo-assembly-line"></a>The photo session was very assembly-line—here (unlike the autograph sessions I witnessed at other conventions) there was no pretense of your $40 giving you the opportunity to actually <em>meet</em> your heroes for even half a minute: this was pose, <em>click</em>, and it's over, time for the next fan to get in position. I had time to say to Dorn, "I'm Jadzia," but that was it.</p>
<p>Not that I was disappointed. A woman on the event staff commented on how happy I looked skipping down the room after the photo was taken. "<a href="http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/You_Are_Cordially_Invited_%28episode%29">My future husband!</a>" I said.</p>
<p>"You're so cute," she said.</p>
<p>I appreciated that. On the <em>whole</em>, however, I feel like I was less enthusiastically received as Jadzia that day than I had been as Pearl at "Portland" Comic-Con—providing what could be seen as a disconfirmatory data point against <a href="/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/">my hypothesis that incompetent MtF crossdressing gets socially-rewarded more than same-sex cosplay</a> (cisplay??) at these sorts of events. There are too many uncontrolled variables to make a fair comparison—this was a different (I think better) costume, of a different character, in front of a different (notably smaller, possibly older?) crowd—but a darker, more specific hypothesis comes to mind.</p>
<p>As Pearl at Comic-Con, no matter what catchphrases I shouted during photo ops, I <em>read</em> as "unapologetic man-in-a-dress not pretending to be anything else," which is cool <em>faux</em>-subversive gender variance. (So brave! Man Pearl is best Pearl!) Whereas Starfleet uniforms are properly unisex: the only gender cues indicating that I was trying to be Jadzia Dax rather than a male Trill lieutenant were my breastforms, the lipstick (a much weaker cue), and the foundation hopefully hiding any residual beard-shadow (a weaker cue still). That put me out of the "man merely wearing <em>clothes</em> reserved for the other sex" category and into "man ineffectually pretending to be a woman" territory.</p>
<p>Maybe that's <em>not</em> cool. Maybe that's just creepy to some people. Even at a science-fiction convention in "Portland." (Even if people in "Portland" are not <a href="https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941">dumb enough to say what they're really thinking</a>.) I didn't see any other crossplayers at the <em>Star Trek</em> con, and the only other <em>highly visible</em> MtF crossplayers I saw at Comic-Con were the guys with beards wearing <em>Sailor Moon</em> outfits (and as for the people I <em>thought</em> I clocked on the ten-second timescale, who can say?—maybe they were real).</p>
<p>I <em>want</em> to be able to say with the unquestioning moral certitude of my youth that none of this should <em>matter</em>, that distinguishing "crossplay" from cosplaying a character that happens to be the same sex as you is discriminatory (and therefore, it need not be said, bad). I chose to play a <em>character</em> that I <em>genuinely admire</em>, and because this character <em>happened</em> to be a woman, I decided to wear the breastforms that I coincidentally happened to already own, in order to make the costume more realistic (given that I am a man and, unlike Jadzia Dax, don't have breasts), in <em>exactly the same way</em> that because this character <em>happened</em> to be a Trill, I decided to paint spots on the sides of my face using liquid eyeliner that I happened to not already own, in order to make the costume more realistic (given that I am a human and, unlike Jadzia Dax, don't have spots on the sides of my face).</p>
<p>I want to say it. I miss that righteous feeling of my youth. But in these dying autumn weeks following a moment of liberating clarity, I am <em>done</em> pretending to be stupid. And maybe I don't want you to pretend, either.</p>Very Reassuring2016-11-25T09:49:00-08:002016-11-25T09:49:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-25:/2016/Nov/very-reassuring/<p>"Don't be offended by the research! We're not calling you a lying pervert! You're just a male with unusual sexual interests who has <a href="/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/">false beliefs about himself</a>, that's all!"
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<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/></p>Reply to Ozymandias on Two-Type MtF Taxonomy2016-11-24T20:46:00-08:002016-11-24T20:46:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-24:/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/<p>This post is a response to Ozymandias's <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/">"Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction"</a> (and is <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/comment-page-1/#comment-23088">cross-posted to the comments</a> there).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Autogynephilia does not work like other sexual fetishes. It is relatively rare for a person to upend their entire life to satisfy a sexual fetish</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Everyone agrees that virtually no …</p><p>This post is a response to Ozymandias's <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/">"Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction"</a> (and is <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/comment-page-1/#comment-23088">cross-posted to the comments</a> there).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Autogynephilia does not work like other sexual fetishes. It is relatively rare for a person to upend their entire life to satisfy a sexual fetish</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Everyone agrees that virtually no one says, "I'm transitioning solely in order to satisfy my unusual sexual interests, no other reason at all!" But <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/">you agree that</a> erotic female embodiment fantasies are <em>very common</em> in pre-trans women; you seem to think this can be a mere manifestation of gender dysphoria. Blanchard <em>et al</em>.'s claim is simply that the causality runs in the other direction: the deeply-felt self-identity beliefs that motivate transition arise out of the self-directed heterosexuality, not the other way around; the thing that people describe as the euphoria of being correctly gendered might be better modeled of as <a href="http://www.annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf">the autogynephilic analogue of romantic love</a>. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>no evidence that ageplayers are any more likely than anyone else to want to have sex with children</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although <em>New York</em> magazine's <em>Science of Us</em> blog recently had <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/11/heres-a-new-discovery-about-pedophiles.html">a post about the converse</a>!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why aren’t redhead fetishists aroused by having red hair [...] given men’s preference for twenty-two-year-old women why aren’t there a bunch of men deeply erotically interested in being twenty-two?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Men with erotic target location errors who are attracted to twenty-two-year-old redheaded women <em>are</em> erotically interested in the idea of being twenty-two-year-old redheaded women. I'm not sure why you would make the predictions you suggest. Male preferences for young women are about the <em>physical features of young women</em>, not <em>chronological age measured in years</em> (there were no calendars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness!). (I'm reading you as using "redhead fetish" colloquially as indicating a preference for women with red hair; I could imagine attraction to the <em>hair itself</em> in conjunction with an ETLE might result in a fantasical desire to <em>be</em> red hair, but this would be much, much rarer.)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>we don’t see trans women becoming less motivated to transition after they start HRT.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There actually are some accounts of this! See the "Effects of Hormone Therapy" section in Chapter 9 of Anne Lawrence's <em>Men Trapped in Men's Bodies</em>. Or consider <a href="http://www.avitale.com/TNote15Testosterone.htm">Anne Vitale's account</a> of attempted detransitioners feeling their desire to be female return with testosterone administration (and presumably, increased sex drive).</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Second of all, it is strange that autogynephilia is the only erotic target location error that causes a significant number of people to wish to transition. There are maybe some people with bodily identity integrity disorder (although far fewer than gender dysphorics) and maybe some otherkin.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, we expect there to be a lot more autogynephilic trans women than aspiring amputees or otherkin, because attraction to women (that is, standard male sexuality) is vastly more common than attraction to amputees or animals.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Furthermore, the autogynephilia theory does not even explain the data it purports to explain. Why are trans women disproportionately engineers and soldiers, instead of being randomly sampled from the male population?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is <em>not</em> a prediction of the theory. When <em>explaining</em> the theory, people often mention engineering or military careers as an <em>illustration</em> of autogynephilic trans women making more male-typical rather than female-typical occupational choices, which <em>is</em> a prediction of the theory.</p>
<p>As it happens, I don't think autogynephilia and associated gender dysphoria are uniformly distributed in the male population—the association with nerdiness has been independently noted too many times to not be real. This is certainly an interesting direction for future research, but I don't see how it's an <em>objection</em>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why would a fetish make one transition later?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It's not so much that autogynephiles <em>can't</em> transition early—like you say, you know a lot who did so at 19 or 20 (of whom I am <em>so jealous</em>)—but more that the nature of their condition is such that deciding to pull the trigger and just do it after many long years of slowly building up a female gender identity through crossdressing and fantasy is something that makes sense, whereas for the androphilic-feminine type, if you make it to age 30 as a feminine gay man, there's little incentive to not just stay that way.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why would it cause one to not pass as well? Surely fetishizing being an attractive woman would cause one to have a lot of motivation to be an attractive woman.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Part of it is going to be age of transition, as you note. Another part is that there's lot of subtly gendered behavioral stuff that we <em>don't know how to fix</em> independently of <em>motivation</em>, things you might not <em>notice</em> as part of the female-typical phenotype until you meet an autogynephilic trans woman who doesn't have them. <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/">Motor behaviors</a>. <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2012/12/01/the-sound-of-your-voice/">Vocal mannerisms</a>. <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a>Unfortunately (heartbreakingly), this is a <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions">hard problem</a>—harder than people realize!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the idea that very feminine gay men transition because gay men are attracted to masculine men and straight men are attracted to feminine women, so by becoming a woman they can get a more desirable sexual partner</p>
</blockquote>
<p>More generally, we're talking about people who are very behaviorally feminine and have been their entire lives, who <em>fit into society better</em> as women rather than anomalously feminine men. Sexual success is part of that, and some presentations of the theory have put more emphasis on that aspect, but it's probably better to emphasize the extent to which social transition is just an all-around <em>social-success win</em> for these people, without appealing to some atomic "identity".</p>Chromatic Key2016-11-22T07:33:00-08:002016-11-22T07:33:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-22:/2016/Nov/chromatic-key/<p>I had occasion to sing a little song at a party recently, whereupon a trans woman who was present—let's call her "Deborah"—immediately asked if I was gay. (I'm not.) When talking with her later, mentioning that our mutual friend had been trying to convince me that I was …</p><p>I had occasion to sing a little song at a party recently, whereupon a trans woman who was present—let's call her "Deborah"—immediately asked if I was gay. (I'm not.) When talking with her later, mentioning that our mutual friend had been trying to convince me that I was trans (which kind of backfired, incidentally, but that's another story), she stressed that anyone who sang like me had to be either gay or a trans woman.</p>
<p>At the time, I thought that this was bizarre—like, that's not what those words mean! Gay men are men who are attracted to men; trans women were males who decided to transition. I'm a man who's attracted to women, which is not either of those things! Deciding that I must be one of those things based on how I sing is wholly unwarranted!</p>
<p>But <em>I was wrong</em> and <em>Deborah was right</em>. People on the androphilic MtF spectrum tend to have naturally feminine vocal mannerisms; people on the autogynephilic spectrum have a natural incentive to fake it. (And I <em>do</em> fake it.) With neither the inclination nor the incentive, normal straight men <em>don't sing like me</em>, and Deborah was <em>exactly right</em> to pick up on this, even if I think her ontology is ultimately flawed.</p>New Clothes2016-11-21T00:00:00-08:002016-11-21T00:00:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-21:/2016/Nov/new-clothes/<p>If we can't have a more truthful world, I think I would prefer more lies and fewer delusions on the margin.</p>
<p>When the heroine of a dystopian YA novel uncovers the big lie at the center of her society, she wakes up tied to a chair in a dungeon, and …</p><p>If we can't have a more truthful world, I think I would prefer more lies and fewer delusions on the margin.</p>
<p>When the heroine of a dystopian YA novel uncovers the big lie at the center of her society, she wakes up tied to a chair in a dungeon, and a hooded agent of the shadow government says, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret. You <em>will</em> keep quiet about it, or you <em>will</em> regret it."</p>
<p>In real life, when you uncover the big lie at the center of your society, everyone just sort of sneers at you and says, "What, <em>that</em> old theory? That was debunked years ago! Only a stupid, evil, low-status person would believe something like that!"</p>Estranged Family2016-11-20T08:12:00-08:002016-11-20T08:12:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-20:/2016/Nov/estranged-family/<p>"How was your trip?" I ask.</p>
<p>"<em>Ugh.</em> The hotel I was in was hosting a <em>furry</em> convention. Who do those perverts think they are, parading around their fetish in public?"</p>
<p>"Um."</p>
<p>"What?"</p>
<p>"Alexa, you're a <em>lesbian trans woman</em>."</p>
<p>"So?"</p>
<p>"So, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24222046_Erotic_Target_Location_Errors_An_Underappreciated_Paraphilic_Dimension">shouldn't you</a> ..."</p>
<p>"Shouldn't I what?"</p>
<p>"... nothing."</p>Wish Horse2016-11-19T13:20:00-08:002016-11-19T13:20:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-19:/2016/Nov/wish-horse/<p>Mark sighs. "So many nice things that we can't have."</p>
<p>"What?" says Katherine. A beat. "... oh," she says.</p>
<p>"I didn't say anything."</p>
<p>"I know."</p>Editorial Process2016-11-18T19:09:00-08:002016-11-18T19:09:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-18:/2016/Nov/editorial-process/<p><strong>To</strong>: Brian Goodheart <<em>bgoodheart@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>From</strong>: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <<em>etsaotome-westlake@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>Subject</strong>: re: viewer feedback? </p>
<p>What do you think of my new "introduction to evolutionary biology" primer?</p>
<p><strong>Attachment</strong>: evo_primer.pdf</p>
<p>----</p>
<p><strong>To</strong>: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <<em>etsaotome-westlake@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>From</strong>: Brian Goodheart <<em>bgoodheart@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>Subject</strong>: Re: re: viewer feedback …</p><p><strong>To</strong>: Brian Goodheart <<em>bgoodheart@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>From</strong>: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <<em>etsaotome-westlake@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>Subject</strong>: re: viewer feedback? </p>
<p>What do you think of my new "introduction to evolutionary biology" primer?</p>
<p><strong>Attachment</strong>: evo_primer.pdf</p>
<p>----</p>
<p><strong>To</strong>: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <<em>etsaotome-westlake@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>From</strong>: Brian Goodheart <<em>bgoodheart@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>Subject</strong>: Re: re: viewer feedback? </p>
<p>Emma, some of the language here is <em>really</em> problematic. A woman with your history shouldn't need to be reminded of this.</p>
<p>----</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span>etsw@UntrueThought$ sed -i 's/ female / a.f.a.b. /g' evo_primer.tex
etsw@UntrueThought$ sed -i 's/ male / a.m.a.b. /g' evo_primer.tex
etsw@UntrueThought$ git commit -m 'capitulate to SJW morons'
etsw@UntrueThought$ pdflatex evo_primer.tex
</pre></div>
<p>----</p>
<p><strong>To</strong>: Brian Goodheart <<em>bgoodheart@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>From</strong>: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <<em>etsaotome-westlake@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>Subject</strong>: Re: re: viewer feedback? </p>
<p>... better?</p>
<p><strong>Attachment</strong>: evo_primer-2.pdf</p>
<p>----</p>
<p><strong>To</strong>: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <<em>etsaotome-westlake@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>From</strong>: Brian Goodheart <<em>bgoodheart@ucxx.edu</em>><br>
<strong>Subject</strong>: Re: Re: re: viewer feedback? </p>
<p>Much better!</p>Sexology's Sad Lexicon2016-11-06T18:52:00-08:002016-11-06T18:52:00-08:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-11-06:/2016/Nov/sexologys-sad-lexicon/<p>(In honor of Chicago's victory in the recently-concluded 2016 World Series, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball%27s_Sad_Lexicon#Composition">apologies to Franklin Pierce Adams</a>.)</p>
<p>These are the saddest of possible names:<br>
 "Blanchard and Bailey and Lawrence."<br>
Trio of scholars on guys being dames,<br>
 Blanchard and Bailey and Lawrence.<br>
Ruthlessly pricking our gender identity<br>
 Making a trans woman …</p><p>(In honor of Chicago's victory in the recently-concluded 2016 World Series, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball%27s_Sad_Lexicon#Composition">apologies to Franklin Pierce Adams</a>.)</p>
<p>These are the saddest of possible names:<br>
 "Blanchard and Bailey and Lawrence."<br>
Trio of scholars on guys being dames,<br>
 Blanchard and Bailey and Lawrence.<br>
Ruthlessly pricking our gender identity<br>
 Making a trans woman face her reality—<br>
Names that survive despite all the world's enmity:<br>
 "Blanchard and Bailey and Lawrence." </p>Exactly What It Says on the Tin2016-10-29T20:33:00-07:002016-10-29T20:33:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-10-29:/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/<p>For many years I've been a fan of a certain genre of, um, adult blogs featuring captioned photographs of women, where the captions tell fantasy stories about how the women used to be men before some magical or technological intervention. The titles of the blogs often contain the word <em>transgender …</em></p><p>For many years I've been a fan of a certain genre of, um, adult blogs featuring captioned photographs of women, where the captions tell fantasy stories about how the women used to be men before some magical or technological intervention. The titles of the blogs often contain the word <em>transgender</em> (or the abbreviation <em>TG</em>). I remember dimly thinking—never in so many words—<em>Gee, I imagine actual transgender people would be pretty offended if they knew that the word used to refer to</em> them <em>was being used to describe</em> this <em>kind of material!</em></p>
<p>... <em>why</em></p>
<p>What kind of pornography did I <em>think</em> pre-trans women used?</p>
<p><em>Why didn't anyone just</em> tell <em>me?!</em></p>Fashion-Forward2016-10-27T20:58:00-07:002016-10-27T20:58:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-10-27:/2016/Oct/fashion-forward/<p><img alt="torso shot of crossdressed male wearing "LATE ONSET GENDER DYSPHORIA IN MALES IS NOT AN INTERSEX CONDITION" T-shirt over purple dress" src="http://unremediatedgender.space/images/fashion-forward.jpg"></p>Introductions2016-10-19T18:45:00-07:002016-10-19T18:45:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-10-19:/2016/Oct/introductions/<p>"Mark, this is Alexa. Alexa, this is Mark."</p>
<p>"Pleased to meet you," she says.</p>
<p>"Pleased to meet you," I say. "You're very tall," I add.</p>
<p>"Thanks, I get that a lot," she says. "What's your shirt about?"</p>
<p>I look down at myself, to be reminded that today is the day …</p><p>"Mark, this is Alexa. Alexa, this is Mark."</p>
<p>"Pleased to meet you," she says.</p>
<p>"Pleased to meet you," I say. "You're very tall," I add.</p>
<p>"Thanks, I get that a lot," she says. "What's your shirt about?"</p>
<p>I look down at myself, to be reminded that today is the day I chose to wear my new custom "LATE-ONSET GENDER DYSPHORIA IN MALES IS NOT AN INTERSEX CONDITION, YOU LYING BASTARDS" T-shirt.</p>
<p>"Oh, that's the name of my favorite rock group," I say. "They're from Canada. You probably haven't heard of them."</p>Reply to Ozymandias on Autogynephilia2016-10-01T18:00:00-07:002016-10-01T18:00:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-10-01:/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/<p>This post is a response to Ozymandias's <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/">"On Autogynephilia"</a>, published on their (highly recommended!) blog, <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/"><em>Thing of Things</em></a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>nothing in this post should be taken as an endorsement of the Blanchard-Bailey theory of autogynephilia, which is clearly untrue. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Clearly! <em>Clearly!</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Blanchard-Bailey theory denies the existence of autoandrophilia</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Ray Blanchard …</em></p><p>This post is a response to Ozymandias's <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/">"On Autogynephilia"</a>, published on their (highly recommended!) blog, <a href="https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/"><em>Thing of Things</em></a>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>nothing in this post should be taken as an endorsement of the Blanchard-Bailey theory of autogynephilia, which is clearly untrue. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Clearly! <em>Clearly!</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Blanchard-Bailey theory denies the existence of autoandrophilia</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Ray Blanchard</em> has said that he doesn't think autoandophilia is a thing (<a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/heres-how-the-guy-who-wrote-the-manual-on-sex-talks-about-sex">"No, I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism [...] I don’t think the phenomenon even exists"</a>), and I agree that he's wrong. This does not have very much evidential bearing on the status of the two-type taxonomy of MtF transsexualism that happened to have been <em>proposed</em> by Ray Blanchard—which taxonomy, I should hardly have to add, is <em>not a theory of trans men!</em></p>
<p>Autoandrophilia does have a <em>little</em> bit of evidential bearing insofar as it's argued that autogynephilia should be classified as a paraphilila, and so we should expect to see much less autoandrophilia in women than autogynephilia in men, because paraphilias in general are much less common (albeit not nonexistent) in women. But this is pretty tangential to the main point of the theory ...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the factors may or may not be correlated, but there are many exceptions</p>
</blockquote>
<p>"May or may not be correlated"?! That's all you have to say?! Summarizing correlations is the <em>entire point</em> of making a taxonomy. Yes, psychology is complicated and people are individuals; no one is going to fit any clinical-profile stereotype <em>exactly</em>. But if we <a href="https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/category/confirming-two-type-taxonomy/">have studies</a> that find correlations (not with correlation coefficients <em>equal to one</em>, but correlations nonetheless) between sexual orientation, age of transition, childhood femininity, and history of erotic cross-dressing—if, sheerly intuitively and anecdotally with no pretense of rigor, it <em>seems plausible</em> that the Laverne Cox/Janet Mock/Sylvia Rivera cluster of people is a distinct thing from the Julia Serano/Deirdre McCloskey/Caitlyn Jenner cluster of people—is it <em>really that bad</em> for someone to speculate, "Hey, maybe these are actually two and only two different psychological conditions with different etiologies"?</p>
<p>Like, maybe it's not true. Maybe there's some other, more detailed and expansive model that makes better predictions. But what is it, <em>specifically</em>? What's your alternative story?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>denial about whether one is an autogynephile is a common trait in autogynephilia, making their theory (based primarily on self-report) utterly unfalsifiable– the definition of bad science.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you categorically reject all hypotheses that predict that sometimes people deny true propositions about themselves, then you will <em>never learn the truth</em> if you happen to live in a world where people sometimes deny true propositions about themselves! Do you <em>really believe</em> that it's <em>so rare</em> for people to deny true propositions about themselves that a hypothesis that predicts that many people are doing so is bad science <em>by definition</em>?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think the concept ‘autogynephilia’ combines [...] conceptually different things. [...] Second, autogynephilia may be a manifestation of gender dysphoria. Typical instances of this form of autogynephilia include [...] Third, there are what one might call ‘true autogynephiles.’ The majority of autogynephiles appear to have no particular desire to transition</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>In what way</em> are those conceptually different things? You're describing a.m.a.b. people engaging in what at least superficially <em>seems</em> like the same behavior, jacking off to the same porn and having the same fantasies. For the ones who might consider transitioning, you say that the erotic behavior "may be a manifestation of gender dysphoria" although it's "unclear [...] how exactly the link [...] happens." For the others, it's not a manifestation of anything in particular. It's certainly possible that autogynephilic arousal in pre-trans women and non-dysphoric men are two completely different things that happen to involve common elements (much like how MtF transsexuality itself is two completely different things that happen to involve common elements!). But what's the specific evidence?</p>
<hr>
<p>A brief note on why all this matters. Independently of whether the two-type taxonomy is in fact taxonic, there are obvious political incentives to dismiss the explanatory value of autogynephilia, because it could be construed as invalidating trans women. I get that.</p>
<p>But here's the thing: you <em>can't</em> mislead the general public without thereby also misleading the next generation of trans-spectrum people. So when a mildly gender-dysphoric boy spends <em>ten years</em> assuming that his gender problems can't possibly be in the same taxon as actual trans women, because the autogynephilia tag seems to fit him perfectly and everyone seems to think that the "Blanchard-Bailey theory of autogynephilia" is "clearly untrue", he might feel a <em>little bit betrayed</em> when it turns out that it's <em>not</em> clearly untrue and that the transgender community at large has been systematically lying to him, or, worse, is so systematically delusional that they might as well have been lying. In fact, he might be so upset as to be motivated to start an entire pseudonymous blog dedicated to dismantling your shitty epistemology!</p>The Real Answer to "Am I Trans or Is It Just a Fetish?"2016-09-12T22:05:00-07:002016-09-12T22:05:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-09-12:/2016/Sep/the-real-answer-to-am-i-trans-or-is-it-just-a-fetish/<p>Both! (And that's okay!)
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<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/> </p>Is There Affirmative Action for Incompetent Crossplay?2016-09-05T23:50:00-07:002016-09-05T23:50:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-09-05:/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/<p><em>(This post was originally published elsewhere, and has been retroactively cross-posted, with slight edits, to the</em> Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought <em>archives.)</em></p>
<p>So I was at "Portland" Comic Con the other day. I don't think I find conventions themselves to be as fun as a lot of other people seem …</p><p><em>(This post was originally published elsewhere, and has been retroactively cross-posted, with slight edits, to the</em> Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought <em>archives.)</em></p>
<p>So I was at "Portland" Comic Con the other day. I don't think I find conventions themselves to be as fun as a lot of other people seem to, but I had never cosplayed before, and had been thinking lately that I have exactly the right body type to play <a href="http://steven-universe.wikia.com/wiki/Pearl">Pearl</a> from <em>Obnoxious Bad Decision Chil</em>—I mean, <em>Steven Universe</em>, on account of being my being tall, thin, white, and having a big nose. (She's even pretty flat-chested!) So I ordered <a href="http://www.hottopic.com/product/cartoon-network-steven-universe-pearl-dress/10619954.html">the Pearl dress from Hot Topic</a> (I maybe should've gotten the XXXL instead of merely the XXL), a pink (really should be more peach, but close enough) wig, yellow gym shorts, and pink socks; improvised a gem from medical tape and the bowl of a plastic spoon; and set off Saturday morning to catch the train to the city and a short walk to the hotel.</p>
<p>The con itself was about what you'd expect, with the usual events and the usual vendor hall. The part that I found striking (enough so that I'm bothering to blog about it) was just how <em>many</em> compliments and photo requests I got for my costume, wholly disproportionate to its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf7v0dgMzE4">actual quality</a>. (I enjoyed the opportunity to ham it up, proclaiming "We are the Crystal Gems!" or singing a few bars from the extended theme during photo ops.) Since this was my first time cosplaying, I don't have calibration, so it's quite possible that I got the ordinary amount of positive attention given costume quality and character popularity, but I <em>suspect</em> that there was something more than that going on having to do with gendered cultural expectations.</p>
<p>Femininity in males is stigmatized more than masculinity in females; that's why I changed in the bathroom at the con rather than wear a dress on the train, and why I don't feel like including any photos in this post despite having shared them on Facebook (visibility settings: "Custom: Friends; Except: Family") and sent them in for the next <a href="http://www.beachcitybugle.com/"><em>Beach City Bugle</em></a> cosplay compilation post. So <em>incompetent</em> MtF crossdressing is "loud" relative to men playing male characters, women playing anyone, and the competent crossdressers (who were clockable on the timescale of ten seconds, but didn't instantly read as "man in a dress" the way I did), and loud things that would be stigmatized in everyday life (probably even everyday life in "Portland") are celebrated at Comic Con. Thus, "man Pearl is best Pearl," as I was told by a young woman (who was cosplaying a male character), even after I insistently pointed out that the other Pearl was <em>way</em> better than me.</p>Psychology Is About Invalidating People's Identities2016-09-05T23:10:00-07:002016-09-05T23:10:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-09-05:/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/<p>When we're doing science to try to figure out how the human mind works, self-reports are certainly a very important source of evidence, albeit not the <em>only</em> source of evidence; it's often possible to measure what people <em>do</em> in addition to what they say about themselves.</p>
<p>As a <em>social</em> rule …</p><p>When we're doing science to try to figure out how the human mind works, self-reports are certainly a very important source of evidence, albeit not the <em>only</em> source of evidence; it's often possible to measure what people <em>do</em> in addition to what they say about themselves.</p>
<p>As a <em>social</em> rule, it's <em>very rude</em> to tell someone that you think they're mistaken about something that they claim about themselves. Because we are nice people, we certainly do not want to be rude! At the same time, however, when we're doing science and trying to find out <em>how things actually work</em> independently of whether the truth conforms to the social rules we observe to keep harmony among ourselves, we <em>cannot</em> commit ourselves to the assumption that all self-reports must be taken as literally true, because—even if no one is deliberately <em>lying</em>, even if everyone is trying their very hardest to choose the words that will best express the ineffable truth of their subjective experience—that would exclude the vast swathes of hypothesis-space under which some people have false beliefs about themselves. </p>
<p>Indeed, if introspection were sufficient to reveal the true structure of human psychology, it's not clear why we would even <em>need</em> to do science; we would just <em>know</em>. It's precisely <em>because</em> careful observation and experiments can tell us things about ourselves that we didn't already know, that science is useful. Ultimately, finding out that something you believe is false—even something you believe <em>about yourself</em>—just <em>isn't that bad</em>. If you keep an <a href="http://paulgraham.com/identity.html">open mind about it</a>, having your identity invalidated by <em>new information</em> is an opportunity for growth: given the new knowledge about what you actually were all along, it might be possible to make better decisions in the service of your values.</p>
<p>Given the vastness of the diversity of human experience, there's always going to be <em>someone</em> who says that the angels spoke to them from a cloud promising the fountain of youth. And we can respect this person and trust that they're telling the truth about their subjective experiences, while at the same time stating confidently: those weren't actually angels.</p>Apophenia?2016-09-05T22:30:00-07:002016-09-05T22:30:00-07:00Zack M. Davistag:unremediatedgender.space,2016-09-05:/2016/Sep/apophenia/<blockquote>
<p>Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall under one of two main archetypes: the "deceptive transsexual" or the "pathetic transsexual." While characters based on both models are presented as having a vested interest in achieving an ultrafeminine appearance, they …</p></blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall under one of two main archetypes: the "deceptive transsexual" or the "pathetic transsexual." While characters based on both models are presented as having a vested interest in achieving an ultrafeminine appearance, they differ in their abilities to pull it off. Because the "deceivers" successfully pass as women, they generally act as unexpected plot twists, or play the role of sexual predators who fool innocent straight guys into falling for other "men." [...] In contrast to the "deceivers," who wield their feminine wiles with success, the "pathetic transsexual" characters aren't deluding anyone. Despite her masculine mannerisms and five o'clock shadow, the "pathetic transsexual" will inevitably insist that she is a woman trapped inside a man's body.</p>
<p>—Julia Serano, <em>Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity</em>, Ch. 2, "Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels"</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Serano is right to call out media producers for inventing and promulgating these harmful stereotypes! One really has to wonder, though, why the media, in the vicious and shallow baseness of its ignorance and transphobia, happened to confabulate those two and only two <em>particular</em> archetypes with which to stigmatize trans women. I mean, it's not as if the emergence of such toxic ideas could be in any way related to some <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology">underlying statistical reality</a>, right??</p>