<a href="/images/laser_9.jpg"><img src="/images/laser_9.jpg" width="180" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
-I had my ninth laser session the other week (out of the ten-session package that I prepaid for), almost a year after [my first](/2017/Nov/laser-1/). (They schedule them out four to six weeks, and I rescheduled a couple of them.) I'm ... pretty underwhelmed by the results so far? My facial hair is nontrivially _thinner_ than it was before (and maybe slightly blonder [by attrition](https://www.urbana.ie/blog/can-laser-hair-removal-work-light-hair/))—it's hard to be sure of the magnitude because apparently I'm still the kind of _idiot_ who doesn't bother to take detailed "Before" photos _even after [explicitly noting this](/2017/Nov/laser-1/#anchor-before)_—but there's still a lot of it noticeably _there_. "Marking my face as male", I want to put it, but maybe that would be a misleading phrasing, because it's not as if people don't reliably, involuntarily infer my sex from my facial structure even at my cleanest-shaven. (And I should remember that things are only going to get worse—despite my beautiful-beautiful ponytail in the back, Trent says my hairline in the front is already a [Norwood 3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%E2%80%93Norwood_scale), and it takes all of my strength as an aspiring rationalist just to believe him.)
+I had my ninth laser session the other week (out of the ten-session package that I prepaid for), almost a year after [my first](/2017/Nov/laser-1/). (They schedule them out four to six weeks, and I rescheduled a couple of them.) I'm ... pretty underwhelmed by the results so far? My facial hair is nontrivially _thinner_ than it was before (and maybe slightly blonder [by attrition](https://www.urbana.ie/blog/can-laser-hair-removal-work-light-hair/))—it's hard to be sure of the magnitude because apparently I'm still the kind of _idiot_ who doesn't bother to take detailed "Before" photos _even after [explicitly noting this](/2017/Nov/laser-1/#anchor-before)_—but there's still a lot of it noticeably _there_. "Marking my face as male", I want to put it, but maybe that would be a misleading phrasing, because it's not as if people don't reliably, involuntarily infer my sex from my facial structure even at my cleanest-shaven. (And I should remember that things are only going to get worse—despite my beautiful–beautiful ponytail in the back, Trent says my hairline in the front is already a [Norwood 3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%E2%80%93Norwood_scale), and it takes all of my strength as an aspiring rationalist just to believe him.)
I'm not sure how typical my results are and why—the [marketing literature](https://www.laseraway.com/articles/hair-removal/effective-laser-hair-removal-really/) from the clinic/parlor/salon promises permanent reduction by "up to 90 percent after 6–8 treatments", but _up to_ isn't exactly a probability distribution. Maybe I just have resilient hair; maybe I'm grimacing or grunting too much during the treatment, priming the merciful nurse–technician to hold back on the zapping more than she (invariably _she_) is supposed to; who knows?
I think I handled it reasonably well?—hemming and stalling for a few seconds before eventually giving _he_, with a disclaimer that the reason I hesitated was because I don't want to imply that I _identify_ with masculinity—it's complicated. The questioner, sensing my discomfort, made an effort to placate or reassure me: "Sure," the person said, nodding, "That's just what you're using right now; that's cool."
-The question was a compliment, really. I don't think they would have asked if I had had a beard. There's _no chance_ of anyone mistaking me for a woman—but maybe the conjunction of my beautiful-beautiful ponytail and my manner and my [slight gynecomastia](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) is enough for me to be mistaken for the kind of man ([in the sense of](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) adult human male) who thinks he can demand that other people perceive him as a woman or nonbinary person. (I think I'm at least as credibly androgynous as a couple of the guys I saw wearing the _they/them/theirs_ stickers.)
+The question was a compliment, really. I don't think they would have asked if I had had a beard. There's _no chance_ of anyone mistaking me for a woman—but maybe the conjunction of my beautiful–beautiful ponytail and my manner and my [slight gynecomastia](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) is enough for me to be mistaken for the kind of man ([in the sense of](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) adult human male) who thinks he can demand that other people perceive him as a woman or nonbinary person. (I think I'm at least as credibly androgynous as a couple of the guys I saw wearing the _they/them/theirs_ stickers.)
How strange it is—to be _seen_ and _unseen_ at the same time. Seen, because nice smart progressive people know to look for cues of gender variance and accord that with deference and latitude, such that I parse (correctly!) as someone who plausibly has some kind of gender problems, rather than "man who happens to have long hair for whatever stupid but uninteresting reason."
Coinbase retaliation!!
+https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1333502028975403009
+https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-2020
+https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-election-is-deeply-puzzling/
+
You don't actually control the policy node
> Nightmare scenario: Republican congress stymies sound Dem policies on health, infrastructure, environment, taxation. To compensate, Biden-Harris mollify progressives by empowering institutional wokeness and authoritarianism around 'systemic racism' and identity politics.
A single-variable measurement like height is like a single coin: unless the coin is _very_ biased, one flip can't tell you much about the bias. But there are lots of things about people for which it's not that they can't be measured, but that the measurements require _more than one number_—which correspondingly offer more information about the distribution generating them.
-And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. Certainly, I agree that almost no one besides professional geneticists interact with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes _existed_ before 1905. [(Co-discovered by a woman!)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens) But the function of [intensional definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) in human natural language isn't to exhaustively [pinpoint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing) a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AIs executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why [Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. ["The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the [SRY gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _is_ at the root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) underlying all other sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living _before_ 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been _right_. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty _well-performing_ definition—if you're looking for a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) that provides a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
+And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. Certainly, I agree that almost no one besides professional geneticists interact with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes _existed_ before 1905. [(Co-discovered by a woman!)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens) But the function of [intensional definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) in human natural language isn't to exhaustively [pinpoint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing) a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AI's executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why [Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. ["The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the [SRY gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _is_ at the root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) underlying all other sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living _before_ 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been _right_. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty _well-performing_ definition—if you're looking for a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) that provides a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
Take faces. People are [verifiably very good at recognizing sex from (hair covered, males clean-shaven) photographs of people's faces](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf) (96% accuracy, which is the equivalent of _d_ ≈ 3.5), but we don't have direct introspective access into what _specific_ features our brains are using to do it; we just look, and _somehow_ know. The differences are real, but it's not a matter of any single, simple measurement you could perform with a ruler (like the distance between someone's eyes). Rather, it's a high-dimensional _pattern_ in many measurements you could take with a ruler, no one of which is definitive. [Covering up the nose makes people slower and slightly worse at sexing faces, but people don't do better than chance at guessing sex from photos of noses alone](/papers/roberts-bruce-feature_saliency_in_judging_the_sex_and_familiarity_of_faces.pdf).
In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person (like me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday), but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force [the Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) to come up. What if you could _interpolate_ between two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both or some fraction of each of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) At what point on the spectrum would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has [a book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity) with lots of these.)
-People _do_ change a lot over time; there _is_ a sense in which, in some contexts, we _don't_ want to say that a sixty-year-old is the "same person" they were when they were twenty—and forty years is "only" 4,870 three-day increments. But if a twenty-year-old were to be magically replaced with their sixty-year-old future self (not just superficially wearing an older body like a suit of clothing, but their brain actually encoding forty more years of experience and decay) ... well, there's a reason I reached for the word "replace" (suggesting putting a _different_ thing in something's place) when describing the scenario. That's what Yudkowsky means by "the change is too sharp"—the _ordinary_ sense in which we model people as the "same person" from day to day (despite people having [more than one proton](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) in a different place from day to day) has an implicit [Lipschitz condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity) buried in it, as assumption that people don't change _too fast_.
+People _do_ change a lot over time; there _is_ a sense in which, in some contexts, we _don't_ want to say that a sixty-year-old is the "same person" they were when they were twenty—and forty years is "only" 4,870 three-day increments. But if a twenty-year-old were to be magically replaced with their sixty-year-old future self (not just superficially wearing an older body like a suit of clothing, but their brain actually encoding forty more years of experience and decay) ... well, there's a reason I reached for the word "replace" (suggesting putting a _different_ thing in something's place) when describing the scenario. That's what Yudkowsky means by "the change is too sharp"—the _ordinary_ sense in which we model people as the "same person" from day to day (despite people having [more than one proton](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) in a different place from day to day) has an implicit [Lipschitz condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity) buried in it, an assumption that people don't change _too fast_.
The thing about Sorites problems is that they're _incredibly boring_. The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap", but in the edge-cases where we're not sure, arguing about whether to use the word "heap" _doesn't change the configuration of sand_. You might think that if [the category is blurry](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray), you therefore have some freedom to [draw its boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) the way you prefer—but [the cognitive function of the category is for making probabilistic inferences on the basis of category-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), and those probabilistic inferences can be quantitatively better or worse. Preferences over concept definitions that aren't about maximizing predictive accuracy are therefore preferences _for deception_, because "making probability distributions less accurate in order to achieve some other goal" is exactly what _deception_ means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
+https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3872/rr-5
+
[racialists get annoyed that people use "skin color" as a metonym for "race", but in this case, we actually are talking about skin color!]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph
> Lesbian culture required the taboo to exist, and since it no longer does as religious objections faded, gay and bisexual women overwhelmingly meet and socialize in normal female company like straight women do.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jzbis2/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_23/gdtfzuz/
+
+https://eev.ee/blog/2020/06/11/rowling-is-dangerously-wrong/
+https://medium.com/@notCursedE/7-things-trans-people-never-actually-said-1ab5e5ce11da
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff