+In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
+
+> [...] 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 _Pride and Prejudice_ 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 Pride and Prejudice 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.
+
+When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
+
+Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an 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, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
+
+The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with having cross-sex fantasies, and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
+
+The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way 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.
+
+A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like a 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?"
+
+It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult should understand—
+
+_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. [TODO: echo the Verrez self-awareness phrasing]
+
+I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _[emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see_. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
+
+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's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-binding our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
+
+But I would have expected people with the barest inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution?
+
+And if that's too much to accept of the general public—
+
+And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—
+
+Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
+
+[TODO: in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like Dawkins (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) and Jerry Coyne (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/) can see it]
+
+
+[TODO:
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+> 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.
+
+If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to strategically say positive things about Republican candidates, and make sure to never, ever say negative things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> 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."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
+> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
+
+]
+
+[TODO:
+And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
+> Also: speaking as someone who's read and enjoyed your LW content, I do hope this isn't a sign that you're going full post-rat. It was bad enough when QC did it (though to his credit QC still has pretty decent Twitter takes, unlike most post-rats).
+
+]
+
+
+I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface 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.
+
+_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 counterpart" and "guy in 2016 Berkeley who identifies as a trans woman" are the _same guy_.
+
+At this point, the nature of the game is very clear. Yudkowsky wants to make sure he's on peaceful terms with the progressive _Zeitgeist_, subject to the constraint of not saying anything he knows to be false. Meanwhile, I want to actually make sense of what's actually going on in the world as regards sex and gender, because _I need the correct answer to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_.
+
+On "his turn", he comes up with some pompous proclamation that's very obviously optimized to make the "pro-trans" faction look smart and good and make the "anti-trans" faction look dumb and bad, "in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles."
+
+On "my turn", I put in an _absurd_ amount of effort explaining in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail why Yudkowsky's pompous proclamation, while [not technically saying making any unambiguously "false" atomic statements](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly), was _substantively misleading_ as constrated to what any serious person would say if they were actually trying to make sense of the world without worrying what progressive activists would think of them.
+
+In the context of AI alignment theory, Yudkowsky has written about a "nearest unblocked strategy" phenomenon: if you directly 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.
+
+Suppose you developed an AI to [maximize human happiness subject to the constraint of obeying explicit orders](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked#exampleproducinghappiness). It might first try administering heroin to humans. When you order it not to, it might switch to administering cocaine. When you order it to not use any of a whole list of banned happiness-producing drugs, it might switch to researching new drugs, or just _pay_ humans to take heroin, _&c._
+
+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 ["I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) (March 2016). When you point out that [that's not true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions), then the next time he revisits the subject, he switches to ["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word, brought explicitly into question, being used with some particular meaning"](https://archive.is/Iy8Lq) (November 2018). When you point out that [_that's_ not true either](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong), he switches to "It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are [...] _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use_" (February 2021). When you point out that's not what's going on, 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, I have no reason to care. 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_; trying to inform you isn't [his bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line).
+
+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 an acrimonious brawl of accusations and name-calling, which is unpleasant and (more importantly) doesn't make any intellectual progress. I, too, would prefer to have a real object-level discussion under the assumption of good faith.
+
+I tried the object-level good-faith argument thing _first_. I tried it for _years_. But at some point, I think I should be _allowed to notice_ the nearest-unblocked-strategy game which is _very obviously happening_ if you look at the history of what was said. I think there's _some_ number of years and _some_ number of thousands of words of litigating the object-level after which there's nothing left for me to do but jump up a meta level and explain, to anyone capable of hearing it, why in this case I think I've accumulated enough evidence in this case for the assumption of good faith to have been _empirically falsified_.
+
+(Of course, I realize that if we're crossing the Rubicon of abandoning the norm of assuming good faith, it needs to be abandoned symmetrically. I _think_ I'm doing a _pretty good_ job of adhering to standards of intellectual conduct and being transparent about my motivations, but I'm definitely not perfect, and, unlike Yudkowsky, I'm not so absurdly miscalibratedly 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_ based on my behavior that _I'm_ being culpably intellectually dishonest, they of course have my blessing and encouragement to post it for the audience to evaluate.)
+
+What makes all of this especially galling is the fact that _all of my heretical opinions are literally just Yudkowsky's opinions from the 'aughts!_ My whole thing about how changing sex isn't possible with existing technology because the category encompasses so many high-dimensional details? Not original to me! I [filled in a few trivial technical details](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard), but again, this was _in the Sequences_ as ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). My thing about how you can't define concepts any way you want, because there are mathematical laws governing which category boundaries compress your anticipated experiences? Not original to me! I [filled in](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [a few technical details](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), but [_we had a whole Sequence about this._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)
+
+Seriously, you think I'm _smart enough_ to come up with all of this indepedently? I'm not! I ripped it all off from Yudkowsky back in the 'aughts _when he still gave a shit about telling the truth_ in this domain. (More precisely, when he thought he could afford to give a shit, before the political environment and the growing stature of his so-called "rationalist" movement changed his incentives.)
+
+Does ... does he expect us not to _notice_? Or does he think that "everybody knows"?
+
+But I don't think that everybody knows. So I'm telling you.
+
+[TODO PARAGRAPH chessboard analogy
+
+playing on a different chessboard—I would be fine with it if he didn't shit on my chessboard. But my shitting on his chessboard
+
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard ("at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard ([TODO linky-quotey not standing in defense of truth]) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards ([TODO linky-quotey clarification]), even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4. But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard ([TODO linkey-quotey normative meaning of 'he']) ... at _that_ point, it's hard for me to consider him as neutrally playing on a different chessboard, rather than actively trying to shit on mine; the turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio in favor of the latter hypothesis.
+
+]