X-Git-Url: http://unremediatedgender.space/source?a=blobdiff_plain;f=content%2Fdrafts%2Fif-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md;h=7a0153e0941f5db9af3b368e941663a8020075da;hb=ef046e71eee088c9960649d58d5739bb7d3dde83;hp=9563602ae596f38aa5f608c35dfd1435b3a1ba66;hpb=3bdada154e58ea1c90d8265e2b0219953ca12ae7;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git diff --git a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md index 9563602..7a0153e 100644 --- a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md +++ b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md @@ -222,7 +222,7 @@ I was _furious_ when "Against Lie Inflation" came out. (Furious at what I percei ----- -While visiting Valinor on 7 August 2019, the older son (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?" +While visiting Valinor on 7 August 2019, Merlin Blume (age 2¾ years) asked me, "Why are you a boy?" After a long pause, I said, "Yes," as if I had misheard the question as "Are you a boy?" I think it was a motivated mishearing: it was only after I answered that I consciously realized that's not what the kid asked. @@ -446,6 +446,22 @@ Secret posse member reassured me that finishing the memoir privately would be cl (It does not, actually, have a happy ending where everyone comes to their senses.) +------ + +While visiting Valinor on 4 February 2020, I remember my nose dripping while I was holding Koios, the baby. Alicorn offered me a tissue. I asked if I shouldn't be holding the baby while my nose was dripping and I therefore plausibly had a cold. She said it was fine. On the topic of possible sickness, I said that I hoped the novel coronavirus people were talking about didn't go pandemic. + +It did. The Berkeley rats took social distancing guidelines very seriously, so it would be a while before I could visit again. + +------ + +On 10 February 2020, Scott Alexander published ["Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), an analysis of the results of the autogynephilia/autoandrophilia questions on the recent _Slate Star Codex_ survey. + +I appreciated the gesture of getting real data, but I was deeply unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner. Three years later, I eventually got around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Feb/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/), rather than cluttering the present narrative with my explanation. + +Briefly, based on eyballing the survey data, Alexander proposes "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" as a "very boring" theory, but on my worldview, a hypothesis that puts "gay people (cis and trans)" in the antecedent is _not_ boring and actually takes on a big complexity penalty: I just don't think the group of gay men _and_ lesbians _and_ straight males with female gender identities _and_ straight females with male gender identities have much in common with each other, except sociologically (being "queer"), and by being human. + +(I do like the hypernym _autogenderphilia_.) + ------- There's another extremely important part of the story that _would_ fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell. @@ -486,12 +502,6 @@ Given that I spent so many hours on this little research/writing project in May ----- -[TODO: pandemic starts] - -[TODO: "Autogenderphilia Is Common" https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/] - ------ - On 1 June 2020, I received a Twitter DM from _New York Times_ reporter Cade Metz, who said he was "exploring a story about the intersection of the rationality community and Silicon Valley". I sent him an email saying that I would be happy to talk, but that I'd actually been pretty disappointed with the community lately: I was worried that the social pressures of trying to _be_ a "community" and protect the group's status (_e.g._, from _New York Times_ reporters who might portray us in an unflattering light??) incentivize people to compromise on the ideals of _systematically correct reasoning_ that made the community valuable in the first place. He never got back to me. Three weeks later, all existing _Slate Star Codex_ posts were taken down. @@ -528,7 +538,7 @@ Suppose the outcome space of _X_ is `{H, T}` and the outcome space of _Y_ is `{1 How could I make this rigorous? Did I want to be talking about the _variance_ of my features conditional on category-membership? Was "connectedness" intrinsically the what I wanted, or was connectedness only important because it cut down the number of possibilities? (There are 8!/(6!2!) = 28 ways to choose two elements from `{1..8}`, but only 7 ways to choose two contiguous elements.) I thought connectedness _was_ intrinsically important, because we didn't just want _few_ things, we wanted things that are _similar enough to make similar decisions about_. -I put the question to a few friends (Subject: "rubber duck philosophy"), and Jessica said that my identification of the variance as the key quantity sounded right: it amounted to the expected squared error of someone trying to guess the values of the features given the category. It was okay that this wasn't a purely information-theoretic criterion, because for problems involving guessing a numeric quantity, bits that get you closer to the right answer were more valuable than bits that didn't. +I put the question to a few friends in July 2020 (Subject: "rubber duck philosophy"), and Jessica said that my identification of the variance as the key quantity sounded right: it amounted to the expected squared error of someone trying to guess the values of the features given the category. It was okay that this wasn't a purely information-theoretic criterion, because for problems involving guessing a numeric quantity, bits that get you closer to the right answer were more valuable than bits that didn't. ------