-Jacob Falkovich notes, ["The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders."](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) [Aaronson notes (in commentary on the _Times_ article)](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
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-Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["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 awknowledging you were wrong."](https://archive.is/SlJo1)
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-Given these political realities, you'd think that I _should_ be sympathetic to the Kolmogorov Option argument, which makes a lot of sense. _Of course_ all the high-status people with a public-facing mission (like building a movement to prevent the coming robot apocalypse) are going to be motivatedly dumb about trans stuff in public: look at all the damage [the _other_ Harry Potter author did to her legacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_J._K._Rowling#Transgender_people).
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-And, historically, it would have been harder for the robot cult to recruit _me_ (or those like me) back in the 'aughts, if they had been less politically correct. Recall that I was already somewhat turned off, then, by what I thought of as _sexism_; I stayed because the philosophy-of-science blogging was _way too good_. But what that means on the margin is that someone otherwise like me except more orthodox or less philosophical, _would_ have bounced. If [Cthulhu has swum left](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified/) over the intervening thirteen years, then maintaining the same map-revealing/not-alienating-orthodox-recruits tradeoff _relative_ to the general population, necessitates relinquishing parts of the shared map that have fallen of general favor.
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-Ultimately, if the people with influence over the trajectory of the systematically correct reasoning "community" aren't interested in getting the right answers in public, then I think we need to give up on the idea of there _being_ a "community", which, you know, might have been a dumb idea to begin with. No one owns _reasoning itself_. Yudkowsky had written in March 2009 that rationality is the ["common interest of many causes"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes): that proponents of causes-that-benefit-from-better-reasoning like atheism or marijuana legalization or existential-risk-reduction might perceive a shared interest in cooperating to [raise the sanity waterline](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline). But to do that, they need to not try to capture all the value they create: some of the resources you invest in teaching rationality are going to flow to someone else's cause, and you need to be okay with that.
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-But Alexander's ["Kolmogorov Complicity"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) (October 2017) seems to suggest a starkly different moral, that "rationalist"-favored causes might not _want_ to associate with others that have worse optics. Atheists and marijuana legalization proponents and existential-risk-reducers probably don't want any of the value they create to flow to neoreactionaries and race realists and autogynephilia truthers, if video of the flow will be used to drag their own names through the mud.
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-[_My_ Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) requires me to take the [Leeroy Jenkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins) Option. (As typified by Justin Murphy: ["Say whatever you believe to be true, in uncalculating fashion, in whatever language you really think and speak with, to everyone who will listen."](https://otherlife.co/respectability-is-not-worth-it-reply-to-slatestarcodex/)) I'm eager to cooperate with people facing different constraints who are stuck with a Kolmogorov Option strategy as long as they don't _fuck with me_. But I construe encouragement of the conflation of "rationality" as a "community" and the _subject matter_ of systematically correct reasoning, as a form of fucking with me: it's a _problem_ if all our beautiful propaganda about the methods of seeking Truth, doubles as propaganda for joining a robot cult whose culture is heavily optimized for tricking men like me into cutting their dicks off.
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-Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
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-But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Arabic "got it wrong."
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-What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
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-I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
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-But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal ["God of the gaps"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
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-In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
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-In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
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-In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.
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-Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.
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-I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
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-My enemy is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_. I don't know what the _right_ culture is, but I'm pretty sure that _this ain't it, chief_.
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-Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
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-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 is—
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-_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. People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
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-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 people out of their ability to report what they see_.
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-In a world where surgery is expensive, but people desperately want to change sex, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-engineering the culture to bind 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.
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-But [_the utility function is not up for grabs._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality) I don't _want_ to reliniqush my ability to notice what women's faces look like, even if that means noticing that mine isn't, even if that seems vaguely disappointing due to an idiosyncracy in my psychosexual development; I don't want people to have to _doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
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-If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
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-I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
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-I'm not at war with trans _people_—open, creative people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with [an _ideology_ that is adapted to appeal to people just like me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) and commit us to remaking our lives around a set of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
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-Maybe that's not particularly reassuring, if people tend to identify with their ideology? (As I used to—as I _still_ do, even if my [revised ideology is much more meta](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).) When the prototypical Christian says "Hate the sin, love the sinner", does anyone actually buy it?
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-But what else can I do? We're living in midst of a pivotal ideological transition. (Is it still the midst, or am I too late?) Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
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-What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to an aggressive recruitment campaign that the scintillating thought is _literally true_, simply because he thought it? (Not just that it could _become_ true _in a sense_, depending on the success of medical and social interventions, and depending on what sex/gender concept definition makes sense to use in a given context.) What kind of Society is that to live in?
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-[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking) Maybe the rest of my robot cult (including the founders and leaders) have given up on trying to tell the truth, but _I_ haven't. If I just keep blogging careful explanations of my thinking, eventually it might make some sort of impact—a small corrective tug on the madness of the _Zeitgeist_.