"So," says my insufficiently-requited love. "What do you suppose is in Room 101?"
-I stare at her breasts for a moment before I catch myself and avert my eyes. "I read an effortpost about this on _themotte.win.onion_," I say, eyes closed, head tilted upwards. "They have a [transcranial magnetic stimulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation) machine. Big electromagnet tweaks your brain to eliminate your implicit bias. Really cool technology, actually: they trained a machine-learning model on MRI scans of people who got perfect [implicit association](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test) and [anti-misgendering](/2020/Feb/cloud-vision/) scores, so they knew exactly what pulses to send to fix all your biased perceptions with no side effects."
+I stare at her breasts for a moment before I catch myself and avert my eyes. "I read an effortpost about this on _themotte.win.onion_," I say, eyes closed, head tilted upwards. "They have a [transcranial magnetic stimulation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation) machine. Big electromagnet tweaks your brain to eliminate your implicit bias. Really schway technology, actually: they trained a machine-learning model on MRI scans of people who got perfect [implicit association](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test) and [anti-misgendering](/2020/Feb/cloud-vision/) scores, so they knew exactly what pulses to send to fix all your biased perceptions with no side effects."
"Oh, that sounds _wonderful_," she says, as I look back towards her to sneak a peek at her breasts again. "I want to be cured of my implicit bias! But," she moves her head to indicate towards the door where the officer had taken Shu, "why—why do you suppose they were so scared?"
Or how, at University, I tried to go by my [first-and-middle-initials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials) because I wanted a gender-neutral [byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline), and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because _that would be crazy_.
-(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the _principle!_)
+(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J." or "J.T.", which feel like a name on account of having a _J_ in it); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the _principle!_)
Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)
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. (Um, with respect to some sense of "know" that doesn't care how unsurprised I was that my 23andMe results came back with a _Y_ and would have bet on it at very generous odds.)
+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. (Um, with respect to some sense of the word "know" that doesn't care how unsurprised I was that my [23andMe](http://23andme.com/) results came back with a _Y_ and that would have happily bet on this at extremely generous odds.)
Certainly, I agree that almost no one interacts 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, _are_ such a common cause—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's entangled with a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
Recently I had an occasion [(don't ask)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general erotic-target-location-error hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are sexually interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are sexually interested in arbitrary _X_.
-And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women.. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for the thing going on with me being an underlying erotic-target-location-error-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
+And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for the thing going on with me being an underlying erotic-target-location-error-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
I don't _know_ the details of what this "erotic target location error" thing is supposed to _be_, exactly—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if _anyone_ knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think _some story in this general vicinity_ has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How _else_ do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's [one of those sensitive bookish males](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) rather than being "macho") having the _conjunction_ of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing _and_, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?
But what _constitutes_ doing right by women, depends on the actual facts of the matter about psychological sex differences—if you _assume_, based on empathic inference, that the target of your benevolence is just like you, you might end up taking actions that hurt rather than help them if you live in one of the possible worlds where they're _not_ just like you.
-The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_. [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
+The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_. That way, you can _update_ when the thing that initially seemed like a good idea turns out to be a _bad_ idea in light of new information about what was already the case the whole time. [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
-----
> decision-theoretically, it's also not their fault. They were all following a strategy that was perfectly reasonable until they ran into someone with an anomalously high insistence that words should mean things
Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.
+
+typographic attack: https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/
+
+https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
+> These neurons detect gender^10
+> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
But—_who_ is "cis", and therefore OK to lie to? Am _I_ cis? If we don't have clear public diagnostic criteria of what it means to be transgender, how am I supposed to _tell_? [I'm sick of this.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/)
-having to argue that "HRT is not cosmetic"
\ No newline at end of file
+having to argue that "HRT is not cosmetic"
+
+from a 2007 notebook—
+> & I'm sorry if this is simply normal maleness directed down an unusual channel—as they say, _autogynephillia_—it's a terrible theory, the BBL nonsense theory—intended to sweep up all transwomen—but it swept up _me_. (But _I'm not trans_.)
+
+Aella's thing about men turning into werewolfs—I'm a well-behaved werewolf. I retain my vocabulary, and transform back into a man when my wolf-form tries to escalate and the lady says "No."
+
+ * practice of deferring to designated-victim trans women _makes the trans
+ women worse people_: if you know that you can win a dispute by playing the
+ transphobia card, that incentive shapes your life (Moldbug: discussion of
+ "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
+ * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
+ personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust
Tags: Charles Murray, review (book), bullet-biting, epistemic horror, game theory, intelligence, ideology, race, politics, stigma, intelligence explosion, genetics
Status: draft
+> A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities betweeen things which seem different.
+>
+> —Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
+
Well, this is awkward.
I liked [reviewing the _last_ Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/).
https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2017/3/13/21111588/it-s-official-new-york-s-prospective-teachers-will-no-longer-have-to-pass-controversial-literacy-exa
For the Singularity https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/05/the-artificial-life-taboo-in-biology.html
+
+From my notebook circa November 2007—
+I think I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm male all the way down, no matter what I say or do or even feel. This is hard to deal with because my <<policies are based on the fact that>> I'm special or the Difference is trivial. <<Whereas all the testing says not really.>> (But I've _always_ been <<inherently gloomy>>)
* boiling rage all the time
* student dysphoria analogy
-math_page_1.jpg
\ No newline at end of file
+math_page_1.jpg
>
> —["Bit Players"](https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/winter_2014/bit_players_by_greg_egan) by Greg Egan
-> Every asshole these days has a blog. Every asshole with a blog wants to “change the world.” But the great thing about being right is that, when the world catches on, you really can’t tell whether or not they heard it from you. The truth, being true, belongs to all.
+> Every asshole these days has a blog. Every asshole with a blog wants to "change the world." But the great thing about being right is that, when the world catches on, you really can't tell whether or not they heard it from you. The truth, being true, belongs to all.
>
> — https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/11/ur-heard-it-here-first-files/
> It comes at much too high a cost!
(Kolmogorov's Iron Triangle)
-> Go, Soul, the body’s guest,
+> Go, Soul, the body's guest,
> Upon a thankless arrant:
> Fear not to touch the best;
> The truth shall be thy warrant:
> Say to the court, it glows
> And shines like rotten wood;
> Say to the church, it shows
-> What’s good, and doth no good:
+> What's good, and doth no good:
> If church and court reply,
> Then give them both the lie.
>
>
> —"I Can See the Light"
-> Yet each generation seems to accept the craziness of the past generation, even when balking at the craziness of the new generation. We think that in the past, academia was on track, and that those who opposed progress were crazy, right-wing nut-jobs. But we dissidents think that this time, this new generationâ\80\93wellâ\80\93they have gone too far and have gone crazy. There is a certain Cthulian horror when suddenly you realize that many of the nut-jobs in the past were actually right. Many were slandered retroactively, not because they were wrong, or evil, not because they made bad predictions, but because they lost and the winners wrote the histories. There is a horror in realizing that you are just like them, this cycle has played out before, and that your childrenâ\80\99s generation will see you as the nut-job.
+> Yet each generation seems to accept the craziness of the past generation, even when balking at the craziness of the new generation. We think that in the past, academia was on track, and that those who opposed progress were crazy, right-wing nut-jobs. But we dissidents think that this time, this new generationâ\80\94wellâ\80\94they have gone too far and have gone crazy. There is a certain Cthulian horror when suddenly you realize that many of the nut-jobs in the past were actually right. Many were slandered retroactively, not because they were wrong, or evil, not because they made bad predictions, but because they lost and the winners wrote the histories. There is a horror in realizing that you are just like them, this cycle has played out before, and that your children's generation will see you as the nut-job.
>
> —[Devin Helton](https://devinhelton.com/historical-amnesia.html)
[You must say it, because it is true]
-> A similar definition of intelligence was expressed by Aquinas as "the ability to combine and separate"—the ability to see the difference between things that seem similar and to see the similarities betweeen things which seem different.
->
-> —Arthur R. Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
-
> Odeen was selfishly pleased with his own flow and thought it graceful and impressive. He had mention that once to Losten, to whom as his Hard-teacher, he confessed everything, and Losten had said, "But don't you think an Emotional or a Parental feels the same about his own flow-pattern. If each of you think differently and act differently, ought you not to be pleased differently?"
>
> —_The Gods Themselves_ by Isaac Asimov
is an [X]. Most of them, in fact, are not. Nor is it absolutely guaranteed
that every single [X] will be a party member. But most of them, in fact,
are"—thus, requiring representaiton of Xes benefits the party
- * practice of deferring to designated-victim trans women _makes the trans
- women worse people_: if you know that you can win a dispute by playing the
- transphobia card, that incentive shapes your life (Moldbug: discussion of
- "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
- * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
- personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust
feminists are masculinized: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4158978/
https://twitter.com/mspowahs/status/957995279092875264
I get this one a lot. So much so that I had to waste three years of my life explaining and re-explaining the cognitive function of categorization in exhaustive, exhaustive detail: see ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (6500 words, February 2018), ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (3800 words, April 2019), and ["Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) (9900 words, January 2021).
+
+> It does shed some light on some of the more cryptic things my mom had said over the years
+https://bodyswapfiction.com/enter/time-loop/
+
+Sex differences in language use, and gays (discussion includes sex-differences cites)
+https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.639887/full
Minor queue—
_ I Don't Do Policy
_ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
+_ Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or,
+
_ Elision _vs_. Choice
-_ Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion
_ "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)
More minor or Needs Development—
+_ Correct Diagnosis as Common Interest: ideological detrans as a mirror of ideological trans: https://reclaimingtrans.wordpress.com/
_ "Your Politics Are Interesting" as Worst Compliment
_ I Wish You Well
_ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
-----
+notes from Gender Development textbook—
+
+p. 6
+> Although there is some debate about whether this relatively rare condition should be considered a disorder at all (Bartlett, Vasey, & Bukowski, 2000), there are certainly some children who, from a very young age, show discomfort with their gender category.
+citation goes to Bartlett, N. H., Vasey, P. L., & Bukowski, W. M. (2000). Is gender identity disorder in children a mental disorder? Sex Roles, 43, 753–785.
-wc -w 2020/* 2019/* 2018/* 2017/* 2016/* | sort -n -s -k1,1
+wc -w 2021/* 2020/* 2019/* 2018/* 2017/* 2016/* | sort -n -s -k1,1
- 1004 2017/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan.md
+ 1005 2017/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan.md
1044 2017/lesser-known-demand-curves.md
1099 2020/cloud-vision.md
- 1221 2020/memento-mori.md
+ 1222 2020/memento-mori.md
+ 1238 2021/point-man.md
1456 2019/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point.md
1521 2018/blame-me-for-trying.md
- 1703 2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
+ 1584 2020/crossing-the-line.md
+ 1704 2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md
1927 2017/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision.md
- 1960 2016/joined.md
+ 1968 2016/joined.md
1977 2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md
2059 2020/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness.md
- 2066 2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md
+ 2067 2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md
2144 2019/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender.md
- 2773 2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
- 3759 2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
- 6522 2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
- 11006 2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
+ 2774 2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
+ 3760 2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md
+ 6523 2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
+ 11012 2020/book-review-human-diversity.md
+ 15681 2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
+ 98882 total
+
1491 algorithms_of_deception.md
1552 endogenous_epistemic_factionalization.md
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff