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
11 _ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WikzbCsFjpLTRQmXn/declustering-reclustering-and-filling-in-thingspace
12 _ Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
13 _ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
14 _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
16 _ Elision _vs_. Choice
17 _ Karnofsky's presentism
18 _ motivation for positing meta-attraction
19 _ HPMoR on the function of democracy vs. Yarvin's true election
22 _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
23 _ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
24 _ Joint Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls and Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery
28 _ Model-Free Happiness
31 _ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)
32 _ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
33 _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
34 _ Multi-Book Review: Various Sex-Ed Books for Children
36 _ "Why the Hell It Means So Much to Me"
39 More minor or Needs Development—
40 _ Correct Diagnosis as Common Interest: ideological detrans as a mirror of ideological trans: https://reclaimingtrans.wordpress.com/
41 _ "Your Politics Are Interesting" as Worst Compliment
43 _ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
47 _ Link: Halifax Pride: https://www.halifaxpride.com/news/2021/5/28/halifax-public-library-response
48 _ Link: You're Kidding, Right?
49 _ Link: Lease Bound comic
50 _ Link: Quillette on Sons Becoming Daughters
51 _ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
54 _ Steering Towards Agreement Is Like Discouraging Betting
55 _ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
56 _ Comment on "The Logic of Indirect Speech" (multi-receivers vs. uncertainty about a single recieiver)
58 _ There's No Such Thing as Unmotivated Reasoning
59 _ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
60 _ 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)
61 _ Point of No Return is Relative to a Class of Interventions
62 _ Simulationist Headcanon for Ontologically Basic Train Show
66 _ Cromwell's Rule Is About Physical Symmetry, Not Fairness
67 _ The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
68 _ The Kolmogorov Option Is Incompatible with Rationality as the Common Interest of Many Causes
69 _ "Rationalists" Don't Exist (But Rationality Does)
70 - And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
71 _ importance of getting the direction of causality right
72 _ Memetics vs. Discourse
73 _ Multi-Level Moloch; Or, Technically, the Holocaust Was a Coordination Success
75 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture (working title)
76 _ How do unwind one's "rationalist" social identity?
77 _ Daniel C. Dennett on Near-Term Alignment Problems
81 _ agents with different learning algorithms would find it hard to agree on words?
83 * Objection: but then shouldn't we pick different words for the convergent and phylo clusters? Uncomfortable with wavering lines around "berry"
84 * Reply: story for how we end up with multiple senses attached to the same word
85 https://jsmp.dk/posts/2021-01-24-fruits/
87 Trading Political Favors Doesn't Build True Maps, But Correcting Errors Your Yourself Made, Does
89 (Rationalists don't exist)
90 > how to be a strong rationalist
91 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/4thPHxgBCvteQjLv6/against-context-free-integrity
93 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning / Casuistry Is Unbecoming: Replies to Eliezer Yudkowsky (I don't know how to do this)
95 _ 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 )
98 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)
100 philosophy-of-language replies,
103 _ Reddit: /r/philosophy, /r/TheMotte, /r/theschism, /r/SneerClub
104 _ tags: "The SF Bay Area", "Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement", "Postmortems & Retrospectives"
106 _ "Cis" is like "gentile"
107 _ The Sex/Gender Distinction Was a Mistake
108 _ Complicity (how do reasonable people cooperate with each other instead of dumb people in their own coalition)
109 _ reinterpretting all of Hannah Montana album lyrics as an AGP narrative
110 _ 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
111 _ Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
113 _ 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
114 _ Novemember 2020 Political Notes; Or, Sen. Kelly Loeffler Is Mostly Living in a Simulation Now
115 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
119 _ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/
120 _ reductionist rebuttal to "so you think lesbians aren't women"
121 _ Principles (transhumanism, and sanity)
122 _ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi
123 _ reply to https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/
124 _ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
125 _ Cynical Theories review
126 _ Persongen/univariate fallacy/typical set
127 _ reply on psych prison https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4uvgb4/?context=3
128 _ Irreversible Damage review
129 _ Jessica/wiz AGP defense
130 _ 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/
131 _ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
132 _ Comment on "Towards decolonising computational sciences" https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14258
133 _ My Identity Has a Better Brier Score Than Your Identity
134 _ TV Review: "The Trouble With Edward"
135 _ 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)`)
136 _ the scapegoating dynamic
137 _ 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)
138 _ reply to https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/hermeneutical-injustice-not-gaslighting/
139 _ 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
141 - The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
142 _ follow to "Point Man": prosletyzing religion
143 _ Larmarckian Transmission of FtM?!
147 This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
148 > journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
149 https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
151 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'!"
153 I should email caption bliggers and ask if they know about AGP
154 https://www.imagefap.com/profile/rickbennett
155 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/03/swap-clinic-testimonial-i-can-work-with.html
156 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/10/swap-clinic-win-win-win.html
158 reverse Wason selection task: https://twitter.com/ThetaGrunberg/status/1305296703088545792
160 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
162 (This needs to go into my "Motivations and Political Context")
163 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!
165 (for Elision vs. Choice)
166 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.)
168 (My Identity Has a Better Brier Score)
169 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
170 You might reply: "But you identify as AGP, and attach emotional weight to that—isn't that just another identity label?"
171 but the thing about AGP is that, I actually have reason to believe it "fits" the territory of the underlying psychological variation
172 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
173 invariant under the cultural coding
176 _ Eugenics Is Actually Good, You Worthless Cowards
177 _ The One Where I Try to Be A Little More Explicit About What 'Autogynephilia' Actually Entails
178 _ No One Actually Wants to Change "Gender"
179 _ Ideology Is the General Case (working title)
180 _ Boundary Violations and Territory
181 _ three views on partisanship: "Hierarchy and Wings" "Bioleninism" "Democracy Cis and Trans"
182 _ Link: "AGPs! GROW A PAIR AND POLICE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_qFxtJ7pxw Karen Davis
183 _ Gay + Trans = Straight
186 _ Walker correspondence
187 _ 30 Years of the Blank Slate (Cosmides-Tooby/Pinker/Murray)
188 _ "I Hope You're Happy, California"
189 _ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title)
190 _ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
191 _ Answers on Great Divides: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/questions-for-great-divides.html
192 _ Film Review: Your Name
193 _ World of Masks https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1228093035042541569
194 _ glomerular filtration rate https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_25_2020/frvrhwg/
195 _ I Am Very Bad at Keeping Secrets and Am Therefore Very Reluctant to Offer Confidentiality Promises
197 _ starting to lose sympathy for my crazy past-self
199 "You're conflating sex and gender"—the problem is, Does anyone actually want to change "gender"?—they're bundled for a reason
202 _ You and What Army? Or, The Wisdom to Know the Difference
203 _ different ways of factoring a Bayes net of the same data make different predictions about interventions
204 _ COVID life-years (rather than deaths)
205 _ Signals, Deception, and the Precession of Simulacra (LW)
206 _ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
207 _ Comment on Wireheading /r/rational
208 _ Second Derivative (Paul Christiano on growth timelines)
209 _ Selective Reporting and Clustering
210 _ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
211 _ Explicit Disjunction vs. Contradictory Arguments from a Bottom Line
212 _ How they Pin It Down: Equal Environments Assumption Edition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cXzTpSiCrNGzeoRAz/conjunction-controversy-or-how-they-nail-it-down
213 _ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem
215 it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
217 Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time
219 "You can follow people you disagree with!" makes sense if you think of
223 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
225 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
228 Vocabulary as Capital Investment
230 _ Challenges of Mounting an Ideological Crusade
232 B.F. being smart-but-dense
234 how taxonomy/typology emerges from Bayesian networks
236 _ On Being Stereotyped Badly (working title)
240 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/trvFowBfiKiYi7spb/open-thread-july-2019/comment/RYhKrKAxiQxY3FcHa
241 > 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?”)
244 The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated) https://nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
247 _ Product Review: FaceApp
249 _ 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
251 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/
253 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/
255 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."
257 address accusation that I conflate "passing" and biosex
261 Positioning (don't want to prematurely alienate people you're trying to rescue)
263 conservatives complain about low-time preference ppl having too many kids—but from a evolutionary perspective, they're more evolutionarily fit
265 A Science Fiction Story Idea I'm Not Skilled Enough to Write
267 Names and Genders Are Not Relevantly Analogous
269 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia didn't make it into Lawrence's erotic target location paper, did it?
273 Anne Lawrence on AGP Teen Transition
274 Anne Lawrence on Unapologetic Autogynephilic Transsexualism
276 Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization
280 explain my blunder in https://twitter.com/jessi_cata/status/1188567229987577856
282 reply to https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
284 testimony on trans girl periods: http://www.onwednesdays.net/trans-girl-periods/
289 Reading Comprehension Is Rape Culture
291 Reply to David R. MacIver on Gendering
293 Trying to Be Explicit
295 Instrumental Categories, and War
297 (lit-search strategy: go through the del Guidice "Multivariate Misgivings" article and its citations; the Archer paper also mentioned this)
299 Commentary on "Blegg Mode"
301 Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
303 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode)
305 karaoke, celebrity, cognitive load; I don't want people to do that for me
307 Option<String>?! https://web.archive.org/web/20160731010249/https://qntm.org/gay
310 _ "Lies to Cis People", a.k.a., "Lies"
311 _ I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
314 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words : well, that explains the TWAW mantra
316 The Parable of the Good Witch
318 First-Offender Models and the Unilateralist's Blessing
319 The Parable of the Faithful Man and the Cowardly Priest
321 Game Theory of "Apartment Patty"
323 Virtue Signaling Is Costly and Honest
324 (in response to Kosoy's objection)
326 Servants of the Egregore (write-up of egregore theory as told by "Wilhelm")
328 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).
330 Research Question: Complicity
333 Where to Segment a Conversation When There's Stuff You Won't Touch, Without Violating the Virtue of Evenness
334 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)
336 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)
338 In the Presence of Mimickry, Extension and Intension Simplicity Trade-Off
340 Objectivity as a Rhetorical Strategy: probability, words, morality
341 Focus on the Simple Case (accurate maps can have bad effects, but that's a weird second-order analysis)
344 A Human's Abridged Guide to Gender Words
348 in a world where we _actually had_ sex change technology, self-identity doctrine _wouldn't even occur to anyone_
350 Operationalization of Bad Faith: if people make reasoning errors that they wouldn't make with another topic having the same underlying structure
354 The Charity Convergence Trap
362 a big essay about Batesian mimickry
365 _ Codes of Convergence; Or, Smile More
367 _ "I Will Fight [...]": LGBT Patriotism and the Moral Fine-Tuning Objection
374 _ The View From Nowhere
378 _ 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/ )
379 _ Q An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History ...
384 ✓ Interlude XVII (not all men)
386 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"
388 Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb; Or, Charity, Objectivity, and ...
391 _ Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition: Beyond Maximum-Entropy Psychology
392 Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
393 Q The Gender Czar's Compromise
397 Q Book Review: Nevada
398 Product Review: Oculus Go
400 All You Had to Say https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8xa97t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_09_2018/e228vyj/
406 Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
407 _ The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition
408 Q Simple Models Plus Noise Are Better Than Pretending Not to Have a Model
409 Falsifiability and What We Expect Not to See
411 Q The Hand I Was Dealt
412 "diagonalize" http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/ by running the research paper it was based on through it
413 Q Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals
414 Threnody for the Transhumanism of My Youth
415 of course trans genders are less natural; that's the entire fucking point
416 People Really Don't Know Why They Do Things
417 Q I Want to See You Be Brave
418 Passing Is Legitimacy, Legitimacy Is Passing
419 All Men Benefit From Patriarchy
420 (the story about my name)
421 Review of Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic
422 on the poor literary quality of TG captions
423 "Another Me I Haven't Met" (SacAnime cosplay review)
424 go back to east bay tg club night?
425 Product Review: Glamour Boutique's Vee-String Bladder
426 Q This Is Worth a Fight
427 "Trans Women Are Women" is a Positive-Affect Instance of the Noncentral Fallacy
431 story of Gina and Vern selected for GNC
432 story about women engineers and male businesspeople
433 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
434 fix fic for that one episode of _The Orville_