Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
-It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?
+It's weird that he thinks telling the truth is politically impossible, because the specific truths I'm focused on are things he _already said_, that anyone could just look up. I guess the point is that the egregore doesn't have the logical or reading comprehension for that?—or rather (a reader points out) the egregore has no reason to care about the past; if you get tagged as an enemy, your past statements will get dug up as evidence of foul present intent, but if you're doing good enough of playing the part today, no one cares what you said in 2009
+
+Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
+
+E.Y. thinks postrats are emitting "epistemic smog", but the fact that Eigenrobot can retweet my Murray review makes me respect him more than E.Y. https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1397383979720839175
+
+The robot cult is "only" "trying" to trick me into cutting my dick off in the sense that a paperclip maximizer is trying to kill us: an instrumental rather than a terminal value.
+
+> the problem with taqiyya is that your sons will believe you
+https://twitter.com/extradeadjcb/status/1397618177991921667
+
+> I've informed a number of male college students that they have large, clearly detectable body odors. In every single case so far, they say nobody has ever told them that before.
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking/comment/rYKwptdgLgD2dBnHY
+
+It would have been better if someone without a dog in the object-level fight could have loudly but disinterestedly said, "What? I don't have a dog in the object-level fight, but we had a whole Sequence about this", but people mostly don't talk if they don't have a dog.
+
+But if someone without a dog spoke, then they'd get pattern-matched as a partisan; it _had_ to be me
+
+
+As far as I can tell, Professor, I'm just doing what _you_ taught me—carve reality at the joints, speak the truth, even if your voice trembles, make an extraordinary effort when you've got Something to Protect.
>
> —["Girl All the Bad Guys Want"](https://genius.com/Bowling-for-soup-girl-all-the-bad-guys-want-lyrics) by Bowling for Soup (paraphrased)
+
+Outline—
+
+ * What is NB?? Like, what does that mean?
+ * The view that people just "are" NB as a brute fact is not plausible
+ * Instead, NB as a "social technology" (https://samoburja.com/social-technology/)
+ * In this frame, we can inquire as to the costs and benefits of an NB gender regime; this article focuses on some nonobvious costs
+ * NB is a way to opt-out of stereotypes
+ * Signaling catastrophe: if the 5% of androgynous people ID as NB and you're not allowed to refer to their sex in words, does that mean that non-NBs are therefore consenting to being stereotyped?
+ * GNC presentation ("a rocker with a nose ring") has the same signaling dynamics, but doesn't trash our ability to talk about sex when relevant
"Then what _are_ you saying?"
-I'm saying—exactly what I said in the 6000-word blog post. Are ... are you asking for a _summary_, or—
+I'm saying—exactly what I said in the 6500-word blog post. Are ... are you asking for a _summary_, or—
"We're asking what you're telling us we should _do_."
I don't know what _you_ should do! Why would I know that? (Also, what does this "should" thing even _mean_, anyway?)
-I'm _saying_ that useful words correspond to predictively useful concepts, and that biological sex is a predictively useful concept, and that there are at least two distinct classes of psychological motivation for why some males wish they could change sex, one of which is not an intersex condition, and that our currently-existing hormonal and surgical interventions for approximating a sex change are imperfect, such that there are some circumstances where someone making predictions or decisions about a trans person might want to base those predictions or decisions on their model of the person's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) rather than their target gender.
+I'm _saying_ that useful words correspond to predictively useful concepts, and that biological sex is a predictively useful concept, and that there are at least two distinct classes of psychological motivation for why some males wish they could change sex, one of which is not an intersex condition, and that our currently-existing hormonal and surgical interventions for approximating a sex change arex imperfect, such that there are some circumstances where someone making predictions or decisions about a trans person might want to base those predictions or decisions on their model of the person's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) rather than their target gender, and to use corresponding non-obfuscated language in the context of those circumstances.
That _doesn't_ mean that no one should transition (_i.e._, try to approximate changing sex with hormonal and surgical interventions)! A lot of people do it—I'm not, like, denying that they _exist_. It seems to work out pretty well for many of them! Maybe _more_ people should do it!
-But in order for someone to _figure out_ whether or not to do it—and in order for the people they interact with to figure out how to react—it would probably help to _get the theory right_: the biology and psychology and sociology and cognitive science and political science of what sex and gender actually _are_ in the real physical universe, and under what conditions they might actually in-fact be changed. Get the theory right _first_, and _then_ use the theory to make the best decisions. And if different people's interests come into conflict, such that there _is no_ collective decision that everyone is happy with, I can still hope to objectively catalogue the possible outcomes of the conflict—what happens if who wins, and what the space of available ceasefire agreements looks like.
+But in order for someone to _figure out_ whether or not to do it—and in order for the people they interact with to figure out how to react—it would probably help to _get the theory right_: the biology and psychology and sociology and cognitive science and political science of what sex and gender actually _are_ in the real physical universe, and under what conditions they might actually in-fact be changed. Get the theory right _first_, and _then_ use the theory to make the best decisions.
-I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to occasionally bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be _true_.)
+And if different people's interests come into conflict, such that there _is no_ collective decision that everyone is happy with, I can still hope to objectively catalogue the possible outcomes of the conflict—what happens if who wins, and what the space of available ceasefire agreements looks like.
-[TODO: another sentence or two to tie this together ...]
+I'm a person, and this is a (deeply) personal blog. I have my own preferences and my own æsthetics, and no doubt that's going to sometimes bleed in to my attempts to get the theory right. (I wish I could claim otherwise—but that wouldn't be _true_.) But I can at least make an effort to _minimize_ the extent to which that happens—and to _make it clear_ which paragraphs and posts I write are advocating for my preferences (which are likely to not be shared by others) and which are trying to perform an objective analysis (information anyone can benefit from). For the most part, I don't do policy!
-But for the most part, I don't do policy!
+[TODO: sentence about how my victory condition is the two-type taxonomy in textbooks, but that I'm agnostic about how many people should transition, given good information]
I've gotten praise from trans-activist types (_e.g._, for ["Lesser-Known Demand Curves"](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/)), and from gender-critical feminists (_e.g._, for ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)). If I could just get them to praise the _same post_, then I will have succeeded as a writer.
_[(Previously.)](/2017/Jan/the-counter/)_
-_I wish you well
+_[I wish you well](https://genius.com/Anna-waronker-i-wish-you-well-lyrics)
Couldn't you tell after all these years?
I wish you love
And life in a world that you're dreaming of_
+
+
_What made me think
That I could survive all the wear and tear
It's not my thing—_
> This, of course, reflects folk biology, captured in the two dictionary definitions of innate as "present from birth" and as "intrinsic." Social constructivist arguments frequently take the form that because thus-and-such is absent at birth, or doesn't appear until after age seven, or until after puberty, it is obviously "learned" or "socially constructed." AS a result, a common, but generally irrelevant feature of "nativist" versus "environmentalist" debates is over what is "present from birth." This confuses (among other things) the question of whether something is expressed at the time of birth with whether there exists in the individual evolved devel- opmental mechanisms that may activate and organize the expression of an adaptation at some point in the life cycle. Developmental processes continue to bring additional adaptations on line (as well as remove them) at least until adulthood, and there is an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that agedriven adaptive changes in psycho- logical architecture continue throughout adulthood (see, e.g., Daly & Wilson, 1988). Thus, just as teeth and breasts are absent at birth and develop later in an individual's life history, perceptual organization, domain-specific reasoning mechanisms, the language acquisition device, motivational organization, and many other intricate psychological adaptations mature and are elaborated in age-specific fashions that are not simply the product of the accumulation of "experience." Consequently, psychological adaptations may be developmentally timed to appear, disappear, or change operation to mesh with the changing demands of different age-specific tasks, such as parenting, emotional decoding of the mother's voice, language acquisition, species-appropriate song learning, and so on (Daly & Wilson, 1988; Fernald, this volume; Marler, 199 1; Newport, 1990).
> For any particular gender difference, many psy- chologists are interested in whether it was caused (1) by sexually monomorphic psy- chologies encountering differential treatment by the social world, or (2) by sexually differentiated developmental mechanisms encountering treatment from the social world, whether that treatment was uniform or differential. As interesting as this ques- tion may be, however, the fact that an expressed gender difference may first appear after birth, or even late in life, is evidence neither for nor against either of these views.
-Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
-
> Do you consent to peristalsis or apoptosis or the Krebs cycle?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/glg1o7/qt_blind_spots_and_hypocrisy_in_gc_ideology/fqz1om6/
_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (June)
_ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
-_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning: Replies to Eliezer Yudkowsky on Pronoun Conventions and Intellectual Honesty
+_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
Minor queue—
_ I Don't Do Policy
More minor or Needs Development—
+_ I Wish You Well
_ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff