"I Tell Myself" Wednesday morning drafting

diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
index d4bebb5..fe81513 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
+++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
@@ -370,6 +370,7 @@ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/
 
 (I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year so that I can stop grieving and _move on_.)
 
+
 "Don't Revere the Bearer of Good Info" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info
 
 casuistry

diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
index 65103d1..1e64294 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
+++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
@@ -12,11 +12,11 @@ Okay, I understand that in Berkeley 2020, that probably sounds like some kind of
 
 It seems useful to be able to _express this claim in natural language_. I can phrase the claim in more or fewer words, using a greater or lesser amount of caveats, qualifications, or polysyllabic obfuscations, depending on the audience's sensibilities and what aspects of my model I want to call attention to. But I need to be able to talk about the model _somehow_, and talking about the model becomes _more expensive_ if I'm not occasionally allowed to use the phrase "actual woman" in a context where _you know goddamned well_ what I mean by it.
 
-I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing. (Nonhuman animal welfare! Termite-proof-ness!) 
+I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing. (Nonhuman animal welfare! Termite-proof-ness!) One might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ trans women to the real thing. (Though I still feel uncomfortable trying to think of any in particular.) The _point_ is that I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes the _original_ thing, from the artificial thing that's trying to mimic its form while not being exactly the same thing (either by design, or due to technological limitations).
 
 "The trait distribution of trans women isn't identical to that of cis women" does not _convey the same meaning_. Those words do not 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 we don't know how to change with current technology.
 
-The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in _simple language_ without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem, because [...]
+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, because [...]
 
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@@ -34,14 +34,37 @@ And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mista
 
 ---
 
-[if I agree that pronouns aren't lies, why was I so freaked out]
+[pronouns do have truth conditions]
+
+----
+
+So, if I _agree_ that pronouns aren't lies, why was I so freaked out by this?
+
+[Weak Men recenter category boundaries, cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+
+The Popular Author once wrote about how [motivated selective attention paid to weak arguments "are meant to re-center a category"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/):
+
+> The guy whose central examples of religion are Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama is probably going to have a different perception of religion than the guy whose central examples are Torquemada and Fred Phelps. If you convert someone from the first kind of person to the second kind of person, you've gone most of the way to making them an atheist.
+
+> More important, if you convert a culture from thinking in the first type of way to thinking in the second type of way, then religious people will be unpopular and anyone trying to make a religious argument will have to spend the first five minutes of their speech explaining how they're not Fred Phelps, honest, and no, they don't picket any funerals. After all that time spent apologizing and defending themselves and distancing themselves from other religious people, they're not likely to be able to make a very rousing argument for religion.
 
-[pronouns do have truth conditions, Weak Men recenter category boundaries, cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
 
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 [Pope who is also Jesus, Selective Draft Law cases]
 
+Some readers who aren't part of my robot cult—and some who are—might be puzzled at why I was so emotionally disturbed by people being wrong about philosophy. And for almost anyone else in the world, I would just shrug and [set the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to).
+
+Even people who aren't "religious" still have the same species-typical psychological mechanisms that make religions work. The systematically-correct-reasoning community had come to fill a [similar niche in my psychology as a religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p5DmraxDmhvMoZx8J/church-vs-taskforce). I knew this, but the _hope_ was that this wouldn't come with the pathologies of a religion, because our pseudo-religion was _about_ the rules of systematically correct reasoning. The system is _supposed_ to be self-correcting: if the Church authorities are getting something _wrong_, 
+
+[...]
+
+The emotional impact of the most prominent people in the systematically-correct-reasoning
+
+[...]
+
+This is my fault. It's [not like we weren't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult).
+
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 [univariate fallacy; 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"]