check in

diff --git a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
index 9e05167..f7d69cb 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
+++ b/content/drafts/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning.md
@@ -245,5 +245,13 @@ how they would actually think about the problem in dath ilan
 https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/myr3n7/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_26_2021/gw0nhqv/?context=3
 > At some point you realize that your free bazaar of ideas has produced a core (or multiple cores). It is a chamber: semi-permeable, still receptive to external ideas and open to critique, but increasingly more connected on the inside.
 
-
 https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/domain_distance?l=7vk
+
+I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who _didn't_ [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
+
+https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-16
+> 16:  I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female.
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
+
+> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index 4e7c35d..32307fd 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -1917,6 +1917,8 @@ Another new cite: https://twitter.com/rbaron321/status/1361841879445364739
 
 Still citing it (22 Mar 21): https://twitter.com/Cererean/status/1374130529667268609
 
+Still citing it (2 May 21)!!: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
+
 darwin2500 "Women's leagues are for women, trans women are women. That's all the justification needed" https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hym5xb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_27_2020/fzvfres/
 
 another "Categories Were Made" cite, just as an example post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/survey_on_moving_ssc_to_substack/fzwkfqk/
@@ -2648,3 +2650,19 @@ https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/husband-cross-dressing-turned-off-sex-a
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble_(psychology)
 
 There should be a way to look down on the young without being dehumanizing about it. I approve of my teenage self relative to my surroundings
+
+adolescent self-esteem by race &c.
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263756/
+
+> We must secure the existence of our tomboys and a future for tomboy children.
+https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/n3obw1/may_03_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/gxelx5q/
+
+----
+
+Abort commenting on Facebook—
+
+A potential mechanism for why a single man looking for polyamorous partners could come off as "someone with poor odds affording themselves poorer odds" is if the request stems from a "markets for lemons" effect: men with poor mate value might think they have a better chance of finding someone (anyone) if they don't demand exclusivity—but the very fact of advertising this signals their poor mate value! I doubt this model is applicable to [...] particular (unusual) case, but if it applies to many other men, [...] might face the problem of credibly signaling to potential partners that he's not one of those guys—the information asymmetries can't just be moralized away!!
+
+Re normalization of poly and LGBT, I'm skeptical that "political" vs. "not-political" is a useful distinction here; everything that you and your friends happen to agree on looks "non-political". (Indeed, the contingencies of political coalition-formation would seem to be the only reason to lump "LGBT" together into one term/concept; if it weren't for having social conservatives as a commmon enemy, it's not obvious what (e.g.) androphilic males (G) and gynephilic-males-who-wish-they-were-females (part of the T) would have to do with each other, and the coalition may already be starting to fray.) The underlying psychological variations (towards homosexuality, or towards higher levels of sociosexuality) probably exist everywhere, but our culture's particular reification of "poly" or "LGBT" as sexual orientations is setting up an implicit cultural filter (a "political choice") that may be more visible to [...] than others.
+
+-----

diff --git a/notes/post_ideas.txt b/notes/post_ideas.txt
index f2e716c..e5a9cc9 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/post_ideas.txt
+++ b/notes/post_ideas.txt
@@ -1,14 +1,14 @@
 2021 significant posts—
-- Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
 _ Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism  (May)
 _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
 _ 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
 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
 
+_ Overlapping Distributions and Cancellable Stereotypes (the standard GC argument about trans = stereotypes but with more math, why lesbians are women)
 _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
 _ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial) 
-_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture (working title)
+
 _ Book Review: Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (September)
 
 Special—
@@ -18,7 +18,6 @@ Minor or Needs Development—
 - Amulet
 _ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
 _ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
-_ Overlapping Distributions and Cancellable Stereotypes (the standard GC argument about trans = stereotypes but with more math, why lesbians are women)
 _ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
 _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
 
@@ -35,13 +34,14 @@ _ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
 _ Cromwell's Rule Is About Physical Symmetry, Not Fairness
 _ The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
 _ The Kolmogorov Option Is Incompatible with Rationality as the Common Interest of Many Causes
+_ Simulationist Headcanon for Ontologically Basic Train Show
 _ "Rationalists" Don't Exist (But Rationality Does)
 - And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
 _ importance of getting the direction of causality right
 _ Memetics vs. Discourse
 _ Multi-Level Moloch; Or, Technically, the Holocaust Was a Coordination Success
 _ Reasons to Go On
-
+_ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture (working title)
 _ How do unwind one's "rationalist" social identity?
 _ Daniel C. Dennett on Near-Term Alignment Problems
 

diff --git a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-marketing.md b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-marketing.md
index bf309b9..c240457 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-marketing.md
+++ b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-marketing.md
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ _(content warning implied transphobia)_
 _(content warning too much information about weird sexual fetishes)_  
 _(content warning WTF did I just read)_  
 
-(May 2021, 16,000 words)
+(May 2021, ~16,000 words)
 
 ----
 
@@ -35,10 +35,13 @@ And then I'll be done and can move on with my life!!
 
 To SneerClub—
 
-Hi, Sneer Club! I noticed that you've enjoyed some of my [previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/fw9cng/the_lgbt_activist_machinery_instead_adapted/) [work](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/61t94y/rationalist_tries_justifying_their_transphobia_by/), so I thought I would go ahead and proactively share this one with you, because (I'm guessing) it probably checks a lot of the boxes for top sneerable content: it's got Yudkowsky hero-worship, _and_ sexism (as many of you would define that), _and_ transphobia (as many of you would define that), _and_ (a paragraph's worth of) IQ fixation _and_ weird sex stuff!
+
+Hi, Sneer Club! I hope I'm not intruding, but I noticed that you've enjoyed some of my [previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/fw9cng/the_lgbt_activist_machinery_instead_adapted/) [work](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/61t94y/rationalist_tries_justifying_their_transphobia_by/), so I thought I would go ahead and proactively share this one with you, because (I'm guessing) it probably checks a lot of the boxes for top sneerable content: it's got Yudkowsky hero-worship, _and_ sexism (as many of you would define that), _and_ transphobia (as many of you would define that), _and_ (a paragraph's worth of) IQ fixation _and_ weird sex stuff!
 
 (From _my_ perspective, I'm pouring my heart out about the most important thing in my life, but if someone else with a different perspective would only sneer, then I can only hope to have been—if only for a moment, as part of a subroutine in the optimal sneer computation—_understood_. And for that moment, I am grateful.)
 
+[It didn't get moderator-approved (appears on my profile, not on the sub, 1 downvote, no notifications), which makes sense. The reason it felt like a good gamble to submit was the hope of breaking through to some of the people who had pitied me on the earlier submissions. Compare to Duncan's friend who started out expecting to hate my guts, and then felt sympathetic after reading an earlier draft]
+
 -----
 
-reply to: https://twitter.com/17cShyteposter/status/1365586872529874944
\ No newline at end of file
+reply to: https://twitter.com/17cShyteposter/status/1365586872529874944