[^signaling-reasons]: This was brazen cowardice. Today, I would notice that if "for signaling reasons", people don't Like comments that make insightful and accurate predictions about contemporary social trends, then subscribers to our collective discourse will be less prepared for a world in which those trends have progressed further.
-A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek to an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in Berkeley, closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
+<a id="correct-side-of-the-tunnel"></a>A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek to an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in Berkeley, closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's [a lot to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/), but I need a few paragraphs to first talk about the simple version of the theory that makes pretty good predictions on average, as a prerequisite for more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
-The theory was put forth by Blanchard in a series of journal articles in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, and popularized [(to some controversy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen#Negative_reactions) by J. Michael Bailey in the popular-level book _The Man Who Would Be Queen_. The idea is that male-to-female transsexuality isn't one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't have anything to do with each other, except for the potential treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
+<a id="explaining-the-taxonomy"></a>The theory was put forth by Blanchard in a series of journal articles in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, and popularized [(to some controversy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen#Negative_reactions) by J. Michael Bailey in the popular-level book _The Man Who Would Be Queen_. The idea is that male-to-female transsexuality isn't one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't have anything to do with each other, except for the potential treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) since to early childhood, in a way that causes social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. Blanchard called them "homosexual transsexuals", which is sometimes abbreviated as _HSTS_. That's where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
I _do_ have a lot of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
-In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry. I remember one night at the University in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions—in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
+<a id="internalized-misandry"></a>In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry. I remember one night at the University in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions—in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's [account](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.
-Among many works I had skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet, was the neoreactionary blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
+<a id="unqualified-reservations"></a>Among many works I had skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet, was the neoreactionary blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent [an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff