+You might ask, what do I mean by "as a first approximation"?
+
+/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/#a-thing-about-me
+
+
+
+> The realization blasted through Harry like a vast dam breaking, releasing out all its water, bursting through his mind in an irresistible flood that swept everything away.
+> There is only one reality that generates all of the observations.
+
+(http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/104)
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
+
+This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)
+
+
+even after taking into account that the phrase "once you know what to look for" is a 20-meter fire-truck-red flag for [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positive-bias-look-into-the-dark).
+
+Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
+
+The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about in Berkeley 2020.
+
+If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these clever category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language (pronouns and more) because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument, but using the _same_ ordinary word-choice algorithms that they used for everything else.
+
+I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend "Irene" a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman."
+
+
+
+Perhaps so. But back in 2009, **we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.**
+
+**To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**
+
+
+
+[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+
+https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
+
+R₀
+"You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!"
+https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/
+
+
+—
+
+The real alignment-theory lesson is about :
+[TODO: the point it about unforeseen maximum, and for the purposes of a dramatic story, it's OK to focus on the big separating hyperplane, even if there are many other hyperplanes]
+[TODO: "Interpersonal Entanglement" suggests a negotiation]
+
+
+
+[evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement),
+
+
+(Though I think I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience: I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
+
+
+[TODO: ...]
+
+https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
+
+
+One man willing to make an extraordinary effort
+
+You've got to ask yourself one question.
+
+Just _how dumb_ do you think we are? [_Defect!_](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/)
+
+
+Stereotypically, heterosexual marriages tend not to last when the AGP husband's eggshell cracks.
+
+
+better than pretending not to have a theory
+
+but let me start with the simple story first.)
+
+
+
+(Where psychology is complicated enough such that there's much more to be said about what , and what better approximations would look like, but simple theories that [explain a lot of our observations](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) are .)
+
+Tail's criticism of the draft—
+> I think one can't come to the conclusion that the erotic thing caused the sacred self-identity without a prior like "sexual things tend to be earlier in the causality"
+> Without further information, or even if the information one has includes time differences, the assumption should A L W A Y S be confounding rather than direct causation, since confounding is a priori more likely
+
+> [about confounding, I should link—] https://www.gwern.net/Causality
+
+> So there's some contexts - modelling your behavior, mainly - where she would not be the same person. But there might be other contexts, such as caring about her, social commitments, and subjective experience, where she might be the same person (depending on stuff - e.g. if you suddenly turned into the opposite sex, this would probably make it easier to bail on all your existing social commitments - but assuming you don't, and that you're allowed not to, they'd still be there)
+
+> Anne Vitale makes different causal claims
+> Less well-founded, yes, though I don't think they're less well-founded wothout the observation that sexuality usually causes other desires
+
+> [claim that] sexuality reflects hidden desires (rather than causing them)
+
+> Not just vary more independently; that's part of it but a more important part is the ages where they apply
+
+> They might not have an alternative, they might instead think you are privileging the hypothesis, and that there's so much uncertainty that you can't figure it out
+
+> You tell a rationalist about autogynephilia and there's a good chance he privately thinks "oh yeah I have those fantasies"
+> You tell him that it explains transsexuality... Might he then not privately go "wait, that can't be right, I don't want to be a woman"
+> Surveys indicate that on the order of 50% of rationalists are AGP, idk how many admit to being AGP in the private conversations you have with them about the typology, but if it's less than 50% there might be some who have additional reasons to disbelieve that they're not telling you
+
+> You most likely have a positive residual of gender issues, relative to your AGP
+> I jokingly equate this positive residual with MIGI in my mathematical implications blog post
+
+there might be a lot of AGP-transitioners in the win condition
+just not the kind that enter women's bike races and gloat about it
+
+it's all so tiresome
+
+
+Reading the things I do, and talking to the people I do, I see this pattern _over and over and over_ again, where non-exclusively-androphilic trans women will, in the right context, describe experiences that _sound_ a lot like mine—having this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing about the idea of being female, but also, separately, this erotic thing on the same theme—but then _somehow_ manage to interpret the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an inner "gender" and presumed brain-intersex condition, which I just—can't take seriously. (Even before contrasting to the early-onset type, which is what a brain-intersex condition _actually_ looks like.)
+
+All I've been trying to say is that, _in particular_, the word "woman" is such a noun.
+
+It _follows logically_ that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if you want people to agree to that word usage, you need to be able to _argue_ for why it makes sense; you can't just _define_ it to be true, and this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to stigmatize trans people.
+
+> Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 10:04 PM
+> So Katie and Seanan did end up coming over last night, but I wasn't very fun to be around because I was emotionally floored because Michael Vassar (!) said that something I said in an _Overcoming Bias_ comment thread was really creepy and that his first reaction was that I should be banned. And I remember lying in bed last night or this morning feeling sick about it, and trying to think about something not thematic, so that I could relax--and I couldn't think of anything.
+
+> But Vassar had a point, and I apologized, and I feel better now.
+
+> So I am broken and I have made terrible mistakes, but in my rationalist's splendor, all I can do is try to understand the facts of the matter and do better tomorrow. This, even as in my rationalist's splendor, I must predict that this is unlikely to actually work.
+
+> Michael fucking Vassar. Shit!
+
+
+* Dr. Will Powers
+
+[TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers]
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
+
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/03/our-default-info-system-status-and-gossip.html
+
+And because the brain and body are an integrated system, people's intuitive sense of [which parts are "me"]() and which parts are "just" "my body" (which can be swapped out without changing who "I" am), may be much less straightforwardly connected with reality than they'd like to think.
+
+
+But how would that work? The experience described by this trope would be something you'd predict if sexuality was implemented in a separate brain module that could stay with the rest of the body even while the "soul" (the implementation of someone's personality, memory, _&c._) gets swapped out. But if the brain isn't actually modularized that way, the magical transformation process would have to do a lot more custom engineering work (to "fit" the brainware-construed-as-"soul" with sexuality-brainware that matches the body) to get the particular outcome portrayed in the stories.
+
+The problem is that, in the real world, the guys who are jacking off to the _fantasy_ of knowing what it's like to be female, are being motivated by a variation in _male_ sexuality.