1 2021 significant posts—
2 _ Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal
3 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
4 _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
7 _ "Never Smile" linkpost
8 _ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
9 _ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
10 _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
12 _ Elision _vs_. Choice
13 _ Karnofsky's presentism
14 _ motivation for positing meta-attraction
15 _ HPMoR on the function of democracy vs. Yarvin's true election
18 _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
19 _ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
20 _ Joint Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls and Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery
24 _ Model-Free Happiness
27 _ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)
28 _ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
29 _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
30 _ Multi-Book Review: Various Sex-Ed Books for Children
32 _ "Why the Hell It Means So Much to Me"
35 More minor or Needs Development—
36 _ Correct Diagnosis as Common Interest: ideological detrans as a mirror of ideological trans: https://reclaimingtrans.wordpress.com/
37 _ "Your Politics Are Interesting" as Worst Compliment
39 _ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
43 _ Link: Halifax Pride: https://www.halifaxpride.com/news/2021/5/28/halifax-public-library-response
44 _ Link: You're Kidding, Right?
45 _ Link: Lease Bound comic
46 _ Link: Quillette on Sons Becoming Daughters
47 _ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
50 _ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
51 _ Comment on "The Logic of Indirect Speech" (multi-receivers vs. uncertainty about a single recieiver)
53 _ There's No Such Thing as Unmotivated Reasoning
54 _ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
55 _ 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)
56 _ Point of No Return is Relative to a Class of Interventions
57 _ Simulationist Headcanon for Ontologically Basic Train Show
61 _ Cromwell's Rule Is About Physical Symmetry, Not Fairness
62 _ The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
63 _ The Kolmogorov Option Is Incompatible with Rationality as the Common Interest of Many Causes
64 _ "Rationalists" Don't Exist (But Rationality Does)
65 - And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
66 _ importance of getting the direction of causality right
67 _ Memetics vs. Discourse
68 _ Multi-Level Moloch; Or, Technically, the Holocaust Was a Coordination Success
70 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture (working title)
71 _ How do unwind one's "rationalist" social identity?
72 _ Daniel C. Dennett on Near-Term Alignment Problems
76 _ agents with different learning algorithms would find it hard to agree on words?
78 * Objection: but then shouldn't we pick different words for the convergent and phylo clusters? Uncomfortable with wavering lines around "berry"
79 * Reply: story for how we end up with multiple senses attached to the same word
80 https://jsmp.dk/posts/2021-01-24-fruits/
82 Trading Political Favors Doesn't Build True Maps, But Correcting Errors Your Yourself Made, Does
84 (Rationalists don't exist)
85 > how to be a strong rationalist
86 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/4thPHxgBCvteQjLv6/against-context-free-integrity
88 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning / Casuistry Is Unbecoming: Replies to Eliezer Yudkowsky (I don't know how to do this)
90 _ 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 )
93 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)
95 philosophy-of-language replies,
98 _ Reddit: /r/philosophy, /r/TheMotte, /r/theschism, /r/SneerClub
99 _ tags: "The SF Bay Area", "Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement", "Postmortems & Retrospectives"
101 _ "Cis" is like "gentile"
102 _ The Sex/Gender Distinction Was a Mistake
103 _ Complicity (how do reasonable people cooperate with each other instead of dumb people in their own coalition)
104 _ reinterpretting all of Hannah Montana album lyrics as an AGP narrative
105 _ 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
106 _ Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
108 _ 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
109 _ Novemember 2020 Political Notes; Or, Sen. Kelly Loeffler Is Mostly Living in a Simulation Now
110 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
114 _ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/
115 _ reductionist rebuttal to "so you think lesbians aren't women"
116 _ Principles (transhumanism, and sanity)
117 _ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi
118 _ reply to https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/
119 _ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
120 _ Cynical Theories review
121 _ Persongen/univariate fallacy/typical set
122 _ reply on psych prison https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4uvgb4/?context=3
123 _ Irreversible Damage review
124 _ Jessica/wiz AGP defense
125 _ 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/
126 _ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
127 _ Comment on "Towards decolonising computational sciences" https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14258
128 _ My Identity Has a Better Brier Score Than Your Identity
129 _ TV Review: "The Trouble With Edward"
130 _ 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)`)
131 _ the scapegoating dynamic
132 _ 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)
133 _ reply to https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/hermeneutical-injustice-not-gaslighting/
134 _ 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
136 - The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
137 _ follow to "Point Man": prosletyzing religion
138 _ Larmarckian Transmission of FtM?!
142 This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
143 > journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
144 https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
146 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'!"
148 I should email caption bliggers and ask if they know about AGP
149 https://www.imagefap.com/profile/rickbennett
150 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/03/swap-clinic-testimonial-i-can-work-with.html
151 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/10/swap-clinic-win-win-win.html
153 reverse Wason selection task: https://twitter.com/ThetaGrunberg/status/1305296703088545792
155 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
157 (This needs to go into my "Motivations and Political Context")
158 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!
160 (for Elision vs. Choice)
161 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.)
163 (My Identity Has a Better Brier Score)
164 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
165 You might reply: "But you identify as AGP, and attach emotional weight to that—isn't that just another identity label?"
166 but the thing about AGP is that, I actually have reason to believe it "fits" the territory of the underlying psychological variation
167 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
168 invariant under the cultural coding
171 _ Eugenics Is Actually Good, You Worthless Cowards
172 _ The One Where I Try to Be A Little More Explicit About What 'Autogynephilia' Actually Entails
173 _ No One Actually Wants to Change "Gender"
174 _ Ideology Is the General Case (working title)
175 _ Boundary Violations and Territory
176 _ three views on partisanship: "Hierarchy and Wings" "Bioleninism" "Democracy Cis and Trans"
177 _ Link: "AGPs! GROW A PAIR AND POLICE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_qFxtJ7pxw Karen Davis
178 _ Gay + Trans = Straight
181 _ Walker correspondence
182 _ 30 Years of the Blank Slate (Cosmides-Tooby/Pinker/Murray)
183 _ "I Hope You're Happy, California"
184 _ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title)
185 _ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
186 _ Answers on Great Divides: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/questions-for-great-divides.html
187 _ Film Review: Your Name
188 _ World of Masks https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1228093035042541569
189 _ glomerular filtration rate https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_25_2020/frvrhwg/
190 _ I Am Very Bad at Keeping Secrets and Am Therefore Very Reluctant to Offer Confidentiality Promises
192 _ starting to lose sympathy for my crazy past-self
194 "You're conflating sex and gender"—the problem is, Does anyone actually want to change "gender"?—they're bundled for a reason
197 _ You and What Army? Or, The Wisdom to Know the Difference
198 _ different ways of factoring a Bayes net of the same data make different predictions about interventions
199 _ COVID life-years (rather than deaths)
200 _ Signals, Deception, and the Precession of Simulacra (LW)
201 _ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
202 _ Comment on Wireheading /r/rational
203 _ Second Derivative (Paul Christiano on growth timelines)
204 _ Selective Reporting and Clustering
205 _ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
206 _ Explicit Disjunction vs. Contradictory Arguments from a Bottom Line
207 _ How they Pin It Down: Equal Environments Assumption Edition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cXzTpSiCrNGzeoRAz/conjunction-controversy-or-how-they-nail-it-down
208 _ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem
210 it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
212 Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time
214 "You can follow people you disagree with!" makes sense if you think of
218 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
220 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
223 Vocabulary as Capital Investment
225 _ Challenges of Mounting an Ideological Crusade
227 B.F. being smart-but-dense
229 how taxonomy/typology emerges from Bayesian networks
231 _ On Being Stereotyped Badly (working title)
235 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/trvFowBfiKiYi7spb/open-thread-july-2019/comment/RYhKrKAxiQxY3FcHa
236 > 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?”)
239 The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated) https://nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
242 _ Product Review: FaceApp
244 _ 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
246 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/
248 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/
250 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."
252 address accusation that I conflate "passing" and biosex
256 Positioning (don't want to prematurely alienate people you're trying to rescue)
258 conservatives complain about low-time preference ppl having too many kids—but from a evolutionary perspective, they're more evolutionarily fit
260 A Science Fiction Story Idea I'm Not Skilled Enough to Write
262 Names and Genders Are Not Relevantly Analogous
264 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia didn't make it into Lawrence's erotic target location paper, did it?
268 Anne Lawrence on AGP Teen Transition
269 Anne Lawrence on Unapologetic Autogynephilic Transsexualism
271 Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization
275 explain my blunder in https://twitter.com/jessi_cata/status/1188567229987577856
277 reply to https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
279 testimony on trans girl periods: http://www.onwednesdays.net/trans-girl-periods/
284 Reading Comprehension Is Rape Culture
286 Reply to David R. MacIver on Gendering
288 Trying to Be Explicit
290 Instrumental Categories, and War
292 (lit-search strategy: go through the del Guidice "Multivariate Misgivings" article and its citations; the Archer paper also mentioned this)
294 Commentary on "Blegg Mode"
296 Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
298 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode)
300 karaoke, celebrity, cognitive load; I don't want people to do that for me
302 Option<String>?! https://web.archive.org/web/20160731010249/https://qntm.org/gay
305 _ "Lies to Cis People", a.k.a., "Lies"
306 _ I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
309 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words : well, that explains the TWAW mantra
311 The Parable of the Good Witch
313 First-Offender Models and the Unilateralist's Blessing
314 The Parable of the Faithful Man and the Cowardly Priest
316 Game Theory of "Apartment Patty"
318 Virtue Signaling Is Costly and Honest
319 (in response to Kosoy's objection)
321 Servants of the Egregore (write-up of egregore theory as told by "Wilhelm")
323 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).
325 Research Question: Complicity
328 Where to Segment a Conversation When There's Stuff You Won't Touch, Without Violating the Virtue of Evenness
329 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)
331 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)
333 In the Presence of Mimickry, Extension and Intension Simplicity Trade-Off
335 Objectivity as a Rhetorical Strategy: probability, words, morality
336 Focus on the Simple Case (accurate maps can have bad effects, but that's a weird second-order analysis)
339 A Human's Abridged Guide to Gender Words
343 in a world where we _actually had_ sex change technology, self-identity doctrine _wouldn't even occur to anyone_
345 Operationalization of Bad Faith: if people make reasoning errors that they wouldn't make with another topic having the same underlying structure
349 The Charity Convergence Trap
357 a big essay about Batesian mimickry
360 _ Codes of Convergence; Or, Smile More
362 _ "I Will Fight [...]": LGBT Patriotism and the Moral Fine-Tuning Objection
369 _ The View From Nowhere
373 _ 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/ )
374 _ Q An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History ...
379 ✓ Interlude XVII (not all men)
381 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"
383 Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb; Or, Charity, Objectivity, and ...
386 _ Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition: Beyond Maximum-Entropy Psychology
387 Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
388 Q The Gender Czar's Compromise
392 Q Book Review: Nevada
393 Product Review: Oculus Go
395 All You Had to Say https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8xa97t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_09_2018/e228vyj/
401 Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
402 _ The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition
403 Q Simple Models Plus Noise Are Better Than Pretending Not to Have a Model
404 Falsifiability and What We Expect Not to See
406 Q The Hand I Was Dealt
407 "diagonalize" http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/ by running the research paper it was based on through it
408 Q Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals
409 Threnody for the Transhumanism of My Youth
410 of course trans genders are less natural; that's the entire fucking point
411 People Really Don't Know Why They Do Things
412 Q I Want to See You Be Brave
413 Passing Is Legitimacy, Legitimacy Is Passing
414 All Men Benefit From Patriarchy
415 (the story about my name)
416 Review of Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic
417 on the poor literary quality of TG captions
418 "Another Me I Haven't Met" (SacAnime cosplay review)
419 go back to east bay tg club night?
420 Product Review: Glamour Boutique's Vee-String Bladder
421 Q This Is Worth a Fight
422 "Trans Women Are Women" is a Positive-Affect Instance of the Noncentral Fallacy
426 story of Gina and Vern selected for GNC
427 story about women engineers and male businesspeople
428 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
429 fix fic for that one episode of _The Orville_