+I feel betrayed, but that doesn't
+
+"chromosomes" isn't as dumb as it sounds—it's the "root" of the causal net of all other sex differences
+
+Am I suffering from a "hostile media" effect?
+
+Choose a gerrymandered or thin-subspace category isn't that dangerous in itself—it's the dark-side epistemology that kills everyone
+
+deconfusion https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/
+
+I want the thing Ozy is doing here to be _socially unacceptable_; I want it to be _laughed out of the room_
+https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/04/10/in-my-culture/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zGJw9PGhu9e8Z6BEX/fake-norms-or-truth-vs-truth
+
+https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/
+
+(And if you should prefer to model the pain as having been manufactured by the [elephant in my brain](http://elephantinthebrain.com/) as a game-theoretic precommitment to force conscious-me to write in the face of social incentives that would otherwise make silence feel safer, you should know that only real pain is a credible threat.)
+
+If an Outer Party member in the world of George Orwell's 1984 says, "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia," even though they clearly remember events from last week, when Oceania was at war with Eurasia instead [...] even if it's not really their fault
+
+> but not worth starting over over
+
+I mean, this is the part where I do a very not Effective Altruist-themed thing, and stop talking as if I do anything for the good of the lightcone. (Maybe see Ben on "Against Responsibility" and "The Humility Argument for Honesty".) I internalized a particular vision [...] of what conduct is appropriate to a "rationalist"; I'm didn't that standard upheld with respect to my Something to Protect; so I am doing a halt–melt–catch-fire on "the community." It's worth starting over over _for me_. If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.
+
+the appeal to arbitrariness technically extends in both directions (if there's no rule saying you can't use the word to talk about self-identity, there's no rule saying I can't use the word to talk about sex), but systematically favors one side—sex is a pretty robust abstraction, and there's no reason to deny the appeal of robustness
+
+Inadequate Equilibria!
+
+I'm expressing the same kind of frustration as the Great Teacher complaining about cryo not being standard—my personal benchmark of "sanity" isn't realistic
+
+there's a sense in which everyone is behaving reasonably given their incentives, but
+
+"Concessions" don't help: even if people will grant some of my points if I threaten to walk, that's not a truth-seeking discourse process that systematically responds to arguments and evidence
+
+Julia Serano
+
+words don't have intrinsic definitions, but the only reason you would want to repurpose an _existing_ word is either becasuse you think you can carve the joints better, or mindfucking
+
+cat/dog gaslighting; even if you don't particularly need that particular classification for a practical purpose, even so ...
+
+fame: arguing with a Discord server was low-impact compared to getting the leadership on board
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEGnJBHmkcwPTysb7/lonely-dissent
+
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/does-age-bring-wisdom/
+
+> Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it's considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it–or say it only in a very careful way–in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of "low-status" and "bad and wrong" have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it's true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it's in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it's true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don't know how many times it's slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement.
+
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#comment-W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
+> I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other's deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we're talking about here.
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions
+
+> Jun 18, 2008
+> this is too perfectly terrifying, too terrifyingly perfect
+>
+> My search for not-previously-read Eliezer Yudkowsky material was getting kind of pathetic--I'd gotten to the point of reading his old messages in the archives of the extropians mailing list. And then I read this:
+>
+> http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html
+>
+> --and the worst thing is that I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused? I'm not going to read the replies right now. I have work to do, and--and I'm too floored? _I'm just not built to handle this sort of thing_. I remain,
+>
+> Zachary Michael Davis
+
+Arguing with a specific person's published words is important, because otherwise you can strawman
+
+[Am I the asshole?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/)
+
+(I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my 72-hour (== 3 days) evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone.)
+
+blegg commentary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode#aAgSDZ4ddHpzj9fNN
+
+if it's objective, there is truth; if it's not-objective social construction for coordination purposes (like money or Christmas), it is at least subject to _negotiation_ (so "words don't mean anything" isn't a valid excuse)
+
+http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html
+
+If we _actually_ had the sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would be motivated to invent these category-gerrymandering mind games in the first place
+
+at some point, maybe tell my "leading intellectual figure of the alt-right" anecdote??
+
+anyone else I thought was being dumb about philosophy, I would just shrug and write off rather than spend a _goddamned year_ prosecuting the mistake
+
+canary
+
+Scott being more sensible in a less-visible place: https://archive.is/In89y
+
+like [not being an astronaut](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)
+
+[but it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter)
+
+three worlds collide no such thing as love
+
+I would have hoped you'd be proud of me, as your (mass correspondence-course) student
+
+ People who spend their entire lives on the receiving end of the calm voice of [authority-backed-by-implied-violence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/29/reflections-from-the-halfway-point/) might be justified in thinking that Slate Star mistake-theoretic ideals like "reason" and "debate" are for suckers: that's what their distribution of training data actually looks like!
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7gkv/what_happened_to_me_and_why_i_think_women_need/
+
+Archive links—
+Extropians "changing sex is difficult" https://archive.is/En6qW
+
+The _original_ meaning of the word "woman" points to a cluster in
+
+No one is actually surprised in System 1; it's just that the parts of us that talk aren't supposed to believe in psychological sex differences (since before my time—and I still prefer not to believe) or physical sex (since 2015).
+
+Slate Star-power: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/28/ssc-meetups-everywhere-retrospective/ 1,476 people attended SSC meetups,
+
+not-lying is most usefully constraining when a situation is suspected to be adversarial (if you're trying to hurt someone with your speech, not being allowed to outright make shit up constrains you quite a lot)
+
+to which my attitude is: if your behavior is optimized to respond to political threats, but _not_ optimized to respond to carefully reasoned arguments from your friends, at some point your friends have to stop being your friends and start threatening you politically because you've made it clear from your behavior that _that's all you'll respond to_
+
+I think if the so-called "rationality" community is going to not be FRAUDULENT, we should at LEAST be able to publicly clear up the philosophy-of-language mistake (I DON'T expect a community consensus on gender politics; that would be crazy! I JUST expect public consensus on "You can't define a word any way you want", which was not controversial when Eliezer taught us in 2008)
+
+I'm grateful to [...] for actually helping me, but I feel incredibly betrayed that Scott is playing dumb about philosophy (and doesn't want to talk to our coalition anymore), Eliezer will PRIVATELY admit that he has no objections to my philosophy arguments but is playing dumb about how the things he said in public were incredibly misleading (and doesn't want to talk to our coalition anymore). I have more conversation-bandwidth with Anna because I've been friends with her for 10 years, but Anna doesn't believe in free speech; she'll privately sympathize that it's bad that we're in a situation where political factors are interfering with being able to have an honest public conversation about philosophy, but
+
+> "friendship, supplication and economics"
+
+This whole multi-year drama _should_ have been a three-comment conversation. If we were _actually trying_ to do the systematically-correct-reasoning thing
+
+Random Commenter: Hey, that can't be right—we had a whole Sequence about
+
+Robot cult leaders:
+
+> "Those who are savvy in high-corruption equilibria maintain the delusion that high corruption is common knowledge, to justify expropriating those who naively don't play along, by narratizing them as already knowing and therefore intentionally attacking people, rather than being lied to and confused."
+
+Steve said it's funny that Ziz and I are ragequitting over opposite things, and I couldn't help but want to phrase it as "She thinks our institutions are transphobic; I don't think they're transphobic enough"
+
+"I guess an "only delusional people get to self-actualize" equilibrium is better than "no one gets to self-actualize, because the general public wouldn't allow it if they knew the truth" if those _really were_ the only two options
+
+> Katie quoting my comment: "Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\" 01/15/2017
+
+> [I am actively hostile](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1164241431629721600) to neoreaction and the alt-right, routinely block such people from commenting on my Twitter feed, and make it clear that I do not welcome support from those quarters. Anyone insinuating otherwise is uninformed, or deceptive.
+
+; I'm a weird guy; I would like to believe there could be a cis woman like me. Not obvious that I acutally know any. My sister is a natural experiment; hands vs. finger; "felt sense"]
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
+
+genetic heuristic and progressivism
+
+I don't _care_ if the blatantly-misleading statements were carefully worded to permit a true interpretation such that they're not technically "lying."
+
+This situation is _fucked_. I don't care whose "fault" it is. I don't want to "blame" anyone. But as the first step to making things less fucked, I need to _write about the world I see_—and you are, still, a pretty prominent part of my mental universe.
+
+Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal
+
+Heinlein
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1096769579362115584
+
+> When an epistemic hero seems to believe something crazy, you are often better off questioning "seems to believe" before questioning "crazy", and both should be questioned before shaking your head sadly about the mortal frailty of your heroes.
+
+Ooh, how I wish they'd want me to stay.
+
+[trade arrangments: if that's the world we live in, fine]
+
+that's what makes it so hard: the only thing that actually helped me stop being bitter about school, was exiting the entire social context that made it an issue: once I had a grown-up software job
+it became irrelevant
+I was able to ragequit school (which was claiming to be one thing, education, but I don't think was living up to its marketing message) because I had somewhere else to go
+the obvious analogy here is to ragequit the "rationalist community" (which is claiming ot be one thing, but I don't think is living up to its marketing message)
+but ... that's my entire social circle
+
+If I can't ragequit the community, I have to do the analogue of going to grad school, while hating school—I don't have an exit this time
+
+(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity adaptation of the Great Teacher's famous _Harry Potter_ fanfic (Emma Watson having loaned me a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try
+> it's a lens through which you can view many-but-not-all personal dilemmas—"What standard am I holding myself to? Is it high enough?"
+
+see, you're doing this "reasoning about sex differences" thing, and you're allowed to do the reasoning-about-sex-differences thing because you're female. (Same reason Nixon could go to China, and I'm allowed to express gender-identity skepticism.) But since everyone else is required to speak as if gender identity is real and sex differences aren't (because those are the rules for being a good person in Berkeley), we get an equilibrium where discrimination against transfems is a huge Issue
+I'm being incredibly cynical here and it feels awful, but I just ... can't take the things people say literally anymore; I tried, and it drove me crazy
+
+everything anyone says is "true" if the speaker is allowed to define their own category boundaries!
+
+if I'm allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about other people, then those people are also allowed to have unflattering psychological theories about me—not just as a matter of procedural fairness, but "symmetry" in the physics sense (the Rules are universal and don't depend on who "I" am)
+
+"If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything." —Daniel Dennett
+
+> "The Choice between Good and Bad," said the Lord of Dark in a slow, careful voice, as though explaining something to a child, "is not a matter of saying 'Good!' It is about deciding which is which."
+
+inside views are just outside views against a finer-grained method of constructing reference classes
+
+["Fear not to touch the best / The truth shall be thy warrant"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)
+
+more of my Overcoming-Bias-era sex differences denialism: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Evc7xKXjd4LaRR26c
+
+"Preferences about how other people model you" is very general, though! Lots of people would prefer that others model them as smart and funny and attractive, and feel genuine pain when other people don't see them that way. It might be tempting to say, "Ah! We can alleviate that pain by redefining 'smart' and 'funny' and 'attractive' to include the people who are hurt by not being included in those categories" ... and in the short term, if you only look at the emotional state of the people who are now being acclaimed as smart/funny/attractive who previously weren't, it works. But the reason it works is what, from an AI-design perspective, we would call "wireheading": manipulating the map, not the territory; it works because of equivocating between the old cutoff for smart/funny/attractive (what people were originally sad about not having) and the new, artificially lowered bar (which you'll be happy about meeting if you don't realize that it's not the same as the old cutoff).
+smart transhumanism is about keeping the map as accurate as possible (don't destroy language in order to wirehead ourselves) and then using the accurate map to actually make the territory better (e.g., by developing nootropics and cosmetic surgeries to actually make people smarter/funnier/more-attractive, in real life, and not just by linguistic fiat)
+
+> 'that in 10 to 20 years, every male with some kind of autogynephilia will "transition" if something isn't done stop reverse things. That is about 2-3% of the male population.' https://twitter.com/TransRadically/status/1212102282499829761
+
+getting in repetitive arguments on Discord is a form of culture change maybe????
+
+http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/judgment-punishment-and-the-information-suppression-field/
+
+karaoke "some cis women sing bass"
+
+What I'm up against: "you can have a social context wherein nobody is incentivized to figure out who's deserving of Real Woman Status and who's not."
+
+speaking in Sequences links: in my review of "Origins of Unfairness", the phrase "suggestively named Lisp tokens" just came out
+
+Nice Job Breaking It Hero feels relevant to my about-face on sex differences
+
+If the explanation that predicts your observations makes you unhappy, then the explanation—and the unhappiness—are functioning as designed.
+
+fitness subs: https://np.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/et231b/qt_what_good_reason_is_there_to_allow_tw_to_post/
+
+Discord arguments get _very_ repetitive; I wish there was a way to make progress and move on rather than having to keep yelling.
+
+my Culture War struggle is actually structurally similar to AI alignment: the economy/social-justice provides vast riches in the process of eating your soul. (I can have my hair long, I can get HRT and surgeries—but at the cost of not being able to explain why.)
+
+sneaking a copy of MTIMB into the MIRI library after visiting Eliezer (Jessica was outside), because it was what Harry would do (but notably, not Hermione)
+
+playing chess with a pigeon, what the tortise said to Achilles