+> If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don't think I'd call her "me". The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.
+
+In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)—
+
+> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is _No_?
+
+(To which I now realize the correct answer is: Yes, it's fucking cheating! The map is not the territory! You can't change the current _referent_ of "personal identity" with the semantic mind game of declaring that "personal identity" now refers to something else! How dumb do you think we are?! But more on this later.)
+
+[section: "50% of the ones with penises", moving to Berkeley, realized that my thing wasn't different; seemed like something that a systematically-correct-reasoning community would be interested in getting right (maybe the 30% of the ones with penises are actually women thing does fit here after all? (I was going to omit it)]
+
+[section: had a lot of private conversations with people, and they weren't converging with me]
+
+[section: flipped out on Facebook; those discussions ended up getting derailed on a lot of appeal-to-arbitrariness conversation halters, appeal to "Categories Were Made"]
+
+So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _completely general reasons that have nothing to do with gender_. And more specifically, completely general reasons that have been explained in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail in _our own foundational texts_—including some material that I _know_ the Popular Author is intimately familiar with, because _he fucking wrote it_.
+
+[section: noncentral-fallacy / motte-and-bailey stuff, other posts about making predictions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world ]
+
+The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [the](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/) Popular Author—you _actually know the math_.
+
+If I have a "blegg" concept for blue egg-shaped objects—uh, this is [our](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) [standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yFDKvfN6D87Tf5J9f/neural-categories) [example](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside), just [roll with it](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)—what that _means_ is that (at some appropriate level of abstraction) there's a little [Bayesian network](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that if I see a black-and-white photograph of an egg-shaped object, I can use the observation of its shape to update my beliefs about its blegg-category-membership, and then use my beliefs about category-membership to update my beliefs about its blueness. This cognitive algorithm is useful if we live in a world where objects that have the appropriate statistical structure—if the joint distribution P(blegg, blueness, eggness) approximately factorizes as P(blegg)·P(blueness|blegg)·P(eggness|blegg).
+
+"Category boundaries" are just a _visual metaphor_ for the math: the set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than _p_ is conveniently _visualized_ as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space. If you _don't understand_ the relevant math and philosophy—or are pretending not to understand only and exactly when it's politically convenient—you might think you can redraw the boundary any way you want, but you can't, because the "boundary" visualization is _derived from_ a statistical model which corresponds to _empirically testable predictions about the real world_. Fucking with category boundaries corresponds to fucking with the model, which corresponds to fucking with your ability to interpret sensory data. The only two reasons you could _possibly_ want to do this would be to wirehead yourself (corrupt your map to make the territory look nicer than it really is, making yourself _feel_ happier at the cost of sabotaging your ability to navigate the real world) or as information warfare (corrupt shared maps to sabotage other agents' ability to navigate the real world, in a way such that you benefit from their confusion).
+
+[section: started a pseudonymous secret blog; one of the things I focused on was the philosophy-of-language thing, because that seemed _really_ nailed down: "...To Make Predictions" was the crowning achievement of my sabbatical, and I was also really proud of "Reply on Adult Human Females" a few months later. And that was going OK, until ...]
+
+[section: hill of meaning in defense of validity, and I _flipped the fuck out_]