1 2021 significant posts—
2 _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
3 _ Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
4 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
8 _ "Never Smile" linkpost
9 _ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
10 _ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
11 _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
13 _ Elision _vs_. Choice
14 _ Karnofsky's presentism
17 _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
18 _ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
19 _ Joint Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls and Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery
23 _ Model-Free Happiness
26 _ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)
27 _ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
28 _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
29 _ Multi-Book Review: Various Sex-Ed Books for Children
31 _ "Why the Hell It Means So Much to Me"
34 More minor or Needs Development—
35 _ Correct Diagnosis as Common Interest: ideological detrans as a mirror of ideological trans: https://reclaimingtrans.wordpress.com/
36 _ "Your Politics Are Interesting" as Worst Compliment
38 _ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
42 _ Link: Halifax Pride: https://www.halifaxpride.com/news/2021/5/28/halifax-public-library-response
43 _ Link: You're Kidding, Right?
44 _ Link: Lease Bound comic
45 _ Link: Quillette on Sons Becoming Daughters
46 _ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
49 _ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
50 _ Comment on "The Logic of Indirect Speech" (multi-receivers vs. uncertainty about a single recieiver)
52 _ There's No Such Thing as Unmotivated Reasoning
53 _ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
54 _ Longtermism + Hinge of History = Shorttermism (not my original idea, but don't remember whose blog I read this on, so I'll write my own version)
55 _ Point of No Return is Relative to a Class of Interventions
56 _ Simulationist Headcanon for Ontologically Basic Train Show
60 _ Cromwell's Rule Is About Physical Symmetry, Not Fairness
61 _ The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
62 _ The Kolmogorov Option Is Incompatible with Rationality as the Common Interest of Many Causes
63 _ "Rationalists" Don't Exist (But Rationality Does)
64 - And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
65 _ importance of getting the direction of causality right
66 _ Memetics vs. Discourse
67 _ Multi-Level Moloch; Or, Technically, the Holocaust Was a Coordination Success
69 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture (working title)
70 _ How do unwind one's "rationalist" social identity?
71 _ Daniel C. Dennett on Near-Term Alignment Problems
75 _ agents with different learning algorithms would find it hard to agree on words?
77 * Objection: but then shouldn't we pick different words for the convergent and phylo clusters? Uncomfortable with wavering lines around "berry"
78 * Reply: story for how we end up with multiple senses attached to the same word
79 https://jsmp.dk/posts/2021-01-24-fruits/
81 Trading Political Favors Doesn't Build True Maps, But Correcting Errors Your Yourself Made, Does
83 (Rationalists don't exist)
84 > how to be a strong rationalist
85 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/4thPHxgBCvteQjLv6/against-context-free-integrity
87 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning / Casuistry Is Unbecoming: Replies to Eliezer Yudkowsky (I don't know how to do this)
89 _ E.Y. as case study on unconscious-lying and self-report ("their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints" https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228 )
92 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung and the GPT-3 neuron about Trump: imagine a short story, where you suddenly become more villainous in the eyes of the narrative, and it's because a greater fraction of your measure is in simulations written based on an unfavorable view of your legacy (you're only aware of this because the GPT-descendant is smart enough to try to correct for it)
94 philosophy-of-language replies,
97 _ Reddit: /r/philosophy, /r/TheMotte, /r/theschism, /r/SneerClub
98 _ tags: "The SF Bay Area", "Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement", "Postmortems & Retrospectives"
100 _ "Cis" is like "gentile"
101 _ The Sex/Gender Distinction Was a Mistake
102 _ Complicity (how do reasonable people cooperate with each other instead of dumb people in their own coalition)
103 _ reinterpretting all of Hannah Montana album lyrics as an AGP narrative
104 _ Stereotypes are weak probabilistic inferences (Agreeableness d~0.5), category-membership is strong inference, the same word/signal hits both, but stereotypes are (or should be) easy to cancel; shifting default meaning onto stereotypes in order to suit trans (while still having the word attach to something) is a bad trade
105 _ Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
107 _ https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3936528276381860 "Natural does not always mean good." — natural does not always mean good, but at our current tech level, that's actually a really good prior
108 _ Novemember 2020 Political Notes; Or, Sen. Kelly Loeffler Is Mostly Living in a Simulation Now
109 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
113 _ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/
114 _ reductionist rebuttal to "so you think lesbians aren't women"
115 _ Principles (transhumanism, and sanity)
116 _ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi
117 _ reply to https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/
118 _ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
119 _ Cynical Theories review
120 _ Persongen/univariate fallacy/typical set
121 _ reply on psych prison https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4uvgb4/?context=3
122 _ Irreversible Damage review
123 _ Jessica/wiz AGP defense
124 _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data prior: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/how-many-trans-folk-are-there-really/ https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/getting-lost-in-the-crowd/
125 _ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
126 _ Comment on "Towards decolonising computational sciences" https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14258
127 _ My Identity Has a Better Brier Score Than Your Identity
128 _ TV Review: "The Trouble With Edward"
129 _ Comment on "One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-020-01844-2 (tag: `review (paper)`)
130 _ the scapegoating dynamic
131 _ review of "What's the Big Secret?" (acknowledges gender-role conventions which are more salient when people are wearing clothes, but then tells the real answer)
132 _ reply to https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/hermeneutical-injustice-not-gaslighting/
133 _ Comment on "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepcliq/ https://doxa.substack.com/p/googles-colosseum
135 - The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
136 _ follow to "Point Man": prosletyzing religion
137 _ Larmarckian Transmission of FtM?!
141 This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
142 > journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
143 https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
145 optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex, even if your conscious verbal narrative never says 'and now I will confuse and intimidate people who want to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex'!"
147 I should email caption bliggers and ask if they know about AGP
148 https://www.imagefap.com/profile/rickbennett
149 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/03/swap-clinic-testimonial-i-can-work-with.html
150 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/10/swap-clinic-win-win-win.html
152 reverse Wason selection task: https://twitter.com/ThetaGrunberg/status/1305296703088545792
154 I'm not usually—at least, not always—so much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits 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 what the Tortise said to Achilles
156 (This needs to go into my "Motivations and Political Context")
157 Transitioning is easy if you project into the subspace spanned by "given name" and "preferred pronouns" and "frequency of wearing dresses." The problem is that it's not psychologically realistic to expect everyone else to just throw away all the other dimensions—people were using those dimensions!
159 (for Elision vs. Choice)
160 Speakers of my generation are more likely to say "person" when sex isn't relevant, whereas older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers similarly frown on mentioning race (https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) when it's not relevant.)
162 (My Identity Has a Better Brier Score)
163 I'm skeptical of "ace"—I think it's just an identity label that can be successfully marketed to otherwise-ordinary people in the bottom-quartile of libido, by an ideology that wants to sell people identity labels to get them to join the coalition of sexual minorities
164 You might reply: "But you identify as AGP, and attach emotional weight to that—isn't that just another identity label?"
165 but the thing about AGP is that, I actually have reason to believe it "fits" the territory of the underlying psychological variation
166 it's an expression of the theory that trans women (left-coded) and the subjects of that old Atlantic article about (right-coded) married crossdressers ("Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses") are the same thing
167 invariant under the cultural coding
170 _ Eugenics Is Actually Good, You Worthless Cowards
171 _ The One Where I Try to Be A Little More Explicit About What 'Autogynephilia' Actually Entails
172 _ No One Actually Wants to Change "Gender"
173 _ Ideology Is the General Case (working title)
174 _ Boundary Violations and Territory
175 _ three views on partisanship: "Hierarchy and Wings" "Bioleninism" "Democracy Cis and Trans"
176 _ Link: "AGPs! GROW A PAIR AND POLICE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_qFxtJ7pxw Karen Davis
177 _ Gay + Trans = Straight
180 _ Walker correspondence
181 _ 30 Years of the Blank Slate (Cosmides-Tooby/Pinker/Murray)
182 _ "I Hope You're Happy, California"
183 _ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title)
184 _ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
185 _ Answers on Great Divides: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/questions-for-great-divides.html
186 _ Film Review: Your Name
187 _ World of Masks https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1228093035042541569
188 _ glomerular filtration rate https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_25_2020/frvrhwg/
189 _ I Am Very Bad at Keeping Secrets and Am Therefore Very Reluctant to Offer Confidentiality Promises
191 _ starting to lose sympathy for my crazy past-self
193 "You're conflating sex and gender"—the problem is, Does anyone actually want to change "gender"?—they're bundled for a reason
196 _ You and What Army? Or, The Wisdom to Know the Difference
197 _ different ways of factoring a Bayes net of the same data make different predictions about interventions
198 _ COVID life-years (rather than deaths)
199 _ Signals, Deception, and the Precession of Simulacra (LW)
200 _ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
201 _ Comment on Wireheading /r/rational
202 _ Second Derivative (Paul Christiano on growth timelines)
203 _ Selective Reporting and Clustering
204 _ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
205 _ Explicit Disjunction vs. Contradictory Arguments from a Bottom Line
206 _ How they Pin It Down: Equal Environments Assumption Edition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cXzTpSiCrNGzeoRAz/conjunction-controversy-or-how-they-nail-it-down
207 _ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem
209 it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
211 Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time
213 "You can follow people you disagree with!" makes sense if you think of
217 if pro-reality trans people are allied with more numerous anti-reality trans people, that incentivizes me to join an anti-trans coalition, when what I actually (should) want is to cherry-pick the pro-reality people
219 another thing keeping me from trans-IDing: trans is "marked"; choosing it would mean associating with the crazy. Normal Society (with men named Zack) has its own madnesses and crimes, but
222 Vocabulary as Capital Investment
224 _ Challenges of Mounting an Ideological Crusade
226 B.F. being smart-but-dense
228 how taxonomy/typology emerges from Bayesian networks
230 _ On Being Stereotyped Badly (working title)
234 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/trvFowBfiKiYi7spb/open-thread-july-2019/comment/RYhKrKAxiQxY3FcHa
235 > I think sometimes I talk in a way that makes me seem more politically naïve than I actually am, because I feel as if the “naïve” attitude is in some way normative? (“You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?”)
238 The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated) https://nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
241 _ Product Review: FaceApp
243 _ The Strategy of "Apartment Patty" — the outrage strategy only works if you have a coalition to back you up. Deterrent: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/case-social-media-mobs/612202/ Another example: https://twitter.com/jaimetoons/status/1271300265170186240
245 Psychiatrist's response to me is kind of case-in-point https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4valma/
247 you regress to your group's mean—but that depends on how you draw the category boundaries around group membership! This could be a good math post!! https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/
249 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia "An important fantasy for some individuals is being transformed into the preferred object (such as a statue) and experiencing an associated state of immobility or paralysis."
251 address accusation that I conflate "passing" and biosex
255 Positioning (don't want to prematurely alienate people you're trying to rescue)
257 conservatives complain about low-time preference ppl having too many kids—but from a evolutionary perspective, they're more evolutionarily fit
259 A Science Fiction Story Idea I'm Not Skilled Enough to Write
261 Names and Genders Are Not Relevantly Analogous
263 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia didn't make it into Lawrence's erotic target location paper, did it?
267 Anne Lawrence on AGP Teen Transition
268 Anne Lawrence on Unapologetic Autogynephilic Transsexualism
270 Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization
274 explain my blunder in https://twitter.com/jessi_cata/status/1188567229987577856
276 reply to https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
278 testimony on trans girl periods: http://www.onwednesdays.net/trans-girl-periods/
283 Reading Comprehension Is Rape Culture
285 Reply to David R. MacIver on Gendering
287 Trying to Be Explicit
289 Instrumental Categories, and War
291 (lit-search strategy: go through the del Guidice "Multivariate Misgivings" article and its citations; the Archer paper also mentioned this)
293 Commentary on "Blegg Mode"
295 Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
297 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode)
299 karaoke, celebrity, cognitive load; I don't want people to do that for me
301 Option<String>?! https://web.archive.org/web/20160731010249/https://qntm.org/gay
304 _ "Lies to Cis People", a.k.a., "Lies"
305 _ I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
308 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words : well, that explains the TWAW mantra
310 The Parable of the Good Witch
312 First-Offender Models and the Unilateralist's Blessing
313 The Parable of the Faithful Man and the Cowardly Priest
315 Game Theory of "Apartment Patty"
317 Virtue Signaling Is Costly and Honest
318 (in response to Kosoy's objection)
320 Servants of the Egregore (write-up of egregore theory as told by "Wilhelm")
322 Kolmogorov's Iron Triangle; Or, the Not-Being-a-Worthless-Coward Option (epigraph quote: Raleigh's "The Lie")—(include analogy: the fear that atheism would lead to immortality given that ppl don't have to fear Hell, wouldn't have seemed obviously absurd at the time) — honesty, ability to think, and mainstream credibility. The Kolmogorov option sacrifices a lot of honesty in exchange for mainstream credibility. This might seem like a good trade until you consider that "honesty" and "ability to think" aren't independent (because people are bad at compartmentalization and we need to talk to each other to think together).
324 Research Question: Complicity
327 Where to Segment a Conversation When There's Stuff You Won't Touch, Without Violating the Virtue of Evenness
328 In Praise of Cartesianism (you need to _really_ understand "A Human's Guide to Words" before you can do high-grade good-faith social constructionism)
330 Sex Differences and Commonsense Priors (I have parsimony intuitions that make "AGP is caused by pollution" or "AGP is normal in cis women" or "hormone receptors distributions are the same" seem not worth considering)
332 In the Presence of Mimickry, Extension and Intension Simplicity Trade-Off
334 Objectivity as a Rhetorical Strategy: probability, words, morality
335 Focus on the Simple Case (accurate maps can have bad effects, but that's a weird second-order analysis)
338 A Human's Abridged Guide to Gender Words
342 in a world where we _actually had_ sex change technology, self-identity doctrine _wouldn't even occur to anyone_
344 Operationalization of Bad Faith: if people make reasoning errors that they wouldn't make with another topic having the same underlying structure
348 The Charity Convergence Trap
356 a big essay about Batesian mimickry
359 _ Codes of Convergence; Or, Smile More
361 _ "I Will Fight [...]": LGBT Patriotism and the Moral Fine-Tuning Objection
368 _ The View From Nowhere
372 _ reply to Ozy on https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-is-bad-science/ (when marketing in Culture War thread, maybe hat tip https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9cir3w/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_03/e5c1h2c/ )
373 _ Q An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History ...
378 ✓ Interlude XVII (not all men)
380 can the comment on "Bit Players" actually fit on this blog (I didn't empathize with offense at fake physics, but I can take offense at maximum-entropy psychology): epigraph quote, "It's Only a Paper Moon"
382 Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb; Or, Charity, Objectivity, and ...
385 _ Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition: Beyond Maximum-Entropy Psychology
386 Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
387 Q The Gender Czar's Compromise
391 Q Book Review: Nevada
392 Product Review: Oculus Go
394 All You Had to Say https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8xa97t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_09_2018/e228vyj/
400 Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
401 _ The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition
402 Q Simple Models Plus Noise Are Better Than Pretending Not to Have a Model
403 Falsifiability and What We Expect Not to See
405 Q The Hand I Was Dealt
406 "diagonalize" http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/ by running the research paper it was based on through it
407 Q Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals
408 Threnody for the Transhumanism of My Youth
409 of course trans genders are less natural; that's the entire fucking point
410 People Really Don't Know Why They Do Things
411 Q I Want to See You Be Brave
412 Passing Is Legitimacy, Legitimacy Is Passing
413 All Men Benefit From Patriarchy
414 (the story about my name)
415 Review of Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic
416 on the poor literary quality of TG captions
417 "Another Me I Haven't Met" (SacAnime cosplay review)
418 go back to east bay tg club night?
419 Product Review: Glamour Boutique's Vee-String Bladder
420 Q This Is Worth a Fight
421 "Trans Women Are Women" is a Positive-Affect Instance of the Noncentral Fallacy
425 story of Gina and Vern selected for GNC
426 story about women engineers and male businesspeople
427 story about race of humans who have a "sneaky" camoflauge form and someone with their analogue of AGP tries to deliberately lower his status to get it
428 fix fic for that one episode of _The Orville_