"So, I _agree_ that there's a potential for public discussion of certain theories in psychology to have harmful social consequences, and I agree that we should take that into account when deciding whether to discuss something publicly.
-"However, I also think it's important to be _specific_ about the putatively-harmful social consequences you're afraid of, rather than just accepting the [Blue Tribe's](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [cached thought](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/) that all discussion of group differences is _ipso facto_ harmful.
+"However, I also think it's important to be _specific_ about the putatively-harmful social consequences you're afraid of, rather than just accepting the [Blue Tribe's](http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [cached thought](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/) that all discussion of group differences is _ipso facto_ harmful.
"If the _specific_ thing you're worried about is something like, 'Well, maybe the Red Tribe will win an [election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_elections,_2016) and then they'll use their power to do _bad things_,' well, guess what? It's _[morning in America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_in_America), motherfuckers!_"
This kind of thing tends to happen to me every few years or so. (This "if it looks like [everyone is lying](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) about late-onset gender dysphoria in males, maybe [self- and other-reports and -perceptions are wrong in general](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)" breakdown was preceded by my December 2007 "school is actually bad" breakdown, my December 2010 "I feel guilty about not doing a very good job at my live-in internship for this cult [or whatever](http://lesswrong.com/lw/md/cultish_countercultishness/) that's [trying to prevent the coming robot apocalypse](http://intelligence.org/)" breakdown, and my February 2013 "school is actually still bad—no, really; also, I'm scared about how the [Tegmark IV multiverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis) contains unimaginably large amounts of suffering" breakdown.)
-I concede that it's plausible that my psychology falls into a reference class that could receive a bipolar I or paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis if I were to seek out a diagnosis, but right now, I'm modeling the field of psychiatry as an evolved social-control mechanism rather than a genuine attempt to help people, and I correspondingly decline to use its language and categories. (You sometimes hear people talk about psychiatric conditions being "underdiagnosed" at higher IQs, but that's backwards: the underlying psychological variations were [here first](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/); people only bother bucketing them into a "diagnosis" when people with the relevant traits cause problems in Society. But the evolutionarily-novel way that Society happens to be structured isn't necessarily optimized to be _good_ for humans except insofar as humans following their individual incentive gradients usually don't screw things up too badly for themselves. Existing Society is just the thing the forces of memetic evolution happened to cough up in the disruptive wake of the industrial revolution; it doesn't necessarily _make sense_. And _I_ don't cause problems.)
+I concede that it's plausible that my psychology falls into a reference class that could receive a bipolar I or paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis if I were to seek out a diagnosis, but right now, I'm modeling the field of psychiatry as an evolved social-control mechanism rather than a genuine attempt to help people, and I correspondingly decline to use its language and categories. (You sometimes hear people talk about psychiatric conditions being "underdiagnosed" at higher IQs, but that's backwards: the underlying psychological variations were [here first](http://web.archive.org/web/20200426232111/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/); people only bother bucketing them into a "diagnosis" when people with the relevant traits cause problems in Society. But the evolutionarily-novel way that Society happens to be structured isn't necessarily optimized to be _good_ for humans except insofar as humans following their individual incentive gradients usually don't screw things up too badly for themselves. Existing Society is just the thing the forces of memetic evolution happened to cough up in the disruptive wake of the industrial revolution; it doesn't necessarily _make sense_. And _I_ don't cause problems.)
Glancing over my email Sent folder, it looks like the time to pinpoint as when things started to, um, become eventful again, was 2 April. That evening, I got an email tip from our local shaman/raconteur "Travis" that someone we knew had just been thrown in psychiatric prison _too_ (Subject: Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward) and asking if I wanted to get involved. The person in question turned out to be my trans woman friend "Roberta", who had apparently been trying to board a plane in "Cleveland" to visit her family somewhere in Europe (which is large enough that I'm not going to obfuscate its identity with a scare-quoted substitute). Soon enough, I and a number of Roberta's other friends managed to coordinate to start calling psychiatric "hospitals" in the Cleveland area, hoping to find out where she was and talk to her (Subject: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation).
But it also kind of makes sense, right? Well—it's going to take several paragraphs to explain what I mean by that.
-To review, I got _really upset_ and lost a lot of sleep back in February because I didn't know how to make sense of my observations of an alarming fraction of _the smartest people I know_ being seemingly unwilling to publicly affirm the conjunction _biological sex is a predictively useful category_ and _categories should be predictively useful_. (I'm [not making this up](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)! I _couldn't_ make this up!) And because I got upset, that means that _I'm_ the crazy one?! Which means I deserve to be taken to a _literal secret prison_ (if you're not allowed to leave, it's a prison; if the guards refuse to tell anyone whether you're there, it's a secret prison) and drugged by completely unaccountable authority figures, and I'm not supposed to object when the imprisonment-and-drugging is called "care", which _I_ have to pay for?! (The medical insurance—note, not "health insurance"; _medicine_ and _health_ are distinct concepts—from my dayjob covered almost all of the ambulance and prison bills, but I think this should still be described as me having to pay: assuming economics isn't fake, a change in Society leading to fewer psychiatric imprisonments should reduce medical insurance costs, which in turn should increase the fraction of total compensenation from my dayjob that I receive in the form of money rather than medical insurance.)
+To review, I got _really upset_ and lost a lot of sleep back in February because I didn't know how to make sense of my observations of an alarming fraction of _the smartest people I know_ being seemingly unwilling to publicly affirm the conjunction _biological sex is a predictively useful category_ and _categories should be predictively useful_. (I'm [not making this up](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)! I _couldn't_ make this up!) And because I got upset, that means that _I'm_ the crazy one?! Which means I deserve to be taken to a _literal secret prison_ (if you're not allowed to leave, it's a prison; if the guards refuse to tell anyone whether you're there, it's a secret prison) and drugged by completely unaccountable authority figures, and I'm not supposed to object when the imprisonment-and-drugging is called "care", which _I_ have to pay for?! (The medical insurance—note, not "health insurance"; _medicine_ and _health_ are distinct concepts—from my dayjob covered almost all of the ambulance and prison bills, but I think this should still be described as me having to pay: assuming economics isn't fake, a change in Society leading to fewer psychiatric imprisonments should reduce medical insurance costs, which in turn should increase the fraction of total compensenation from my dayjob that I receive in the form of money rather than medical insurance.)
I'm complaining, but if possible, I'd like to avoid portraying myself as a victim here. The primary intended effect of the complaint is not to try to convince you that I have been _wronged_ by someone or something, and that _they_ "should" be held accountable for my suffering. Rather, I'm trying to explain what it felt like to have my model of social reality get undermined.
Economists distinguish a spectrum between _rival_ and _nonrival_ goods. If you want to know more math than your school expects of you, all you need is a book, dedication, and time. If you want an Honorable Mention on the Putnam exam (and don't care about merely getting a better score if you don't make the list), you need to be _better than_ all but no more than 99 entrants. The payoffs in the competitive scenario have a significantly different structure from the scenario where you just want to learn stuff.
-Or do they? Let's consider grad school admissions rather than the Putnam exam. You want to get into the best school possible, to get access to better mentors and better peers. Getting in to any _particular_ school is a contested rivalrous good (we assume that each can only accept a fixed number of applicants _n_, no matter how good the _n_+1th applicant is on some cosmic absolute scale), but when we consider multiple schools with different admissions standards, there's no dire [dual](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/) discontinuity: a small change in application quality results in a small change of best-school-accepted-to (if you don't get into Caltech, go to MIT; if you don't get into MIT; go to Carnegie Mellon; if you ... UC Santa Cruz ... San Diego State ... SF State), much like how a small change in study quality results in a small change in knowledge gained.
+Or do they? Let's consider grad school admissions rather than the Putnam exam. You want to get into the best school possible, to get access to better mentors and better peers. Getting in to any _particular_ school is a contested rivalrous good (we assume that each can only accept a fixed number of applicants _n_, no matter how good the _n_+1th applicant is on some cosmic absolute scale), but when we consider multiple schools with different admissions standards, there's no dire [dual](http://web.archive.org/web/20200423033930/https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/) discontinuity: a small change in application quality results in a small change of best-school-accepted-to (if you don't get into Caltech, go to MIT; if you don't get into MIT; go to Carnegie Mellon; if you ... UC Santa Cruz ... San Diego State ... SF State), much like how a small change in study quality results in a small change in knowledge gained.
So the real problem can't be the fact of competition as such. Rather, the problem is the _mismatch_ between the criteria by which you're snobby about schools and the criteria by which schools are snobby about you. Doing a PhD is a serious commitment; you should only do it if you're genuinely in love with the program, not because you're afraid of not being in academia. Even if there's always _someone_ who would take you as a student, _it's not going to work very well_ if you're going to spend seven years in a fog of barely-concealed contempt, trying not to say out loud, "This place is kind of a dump; I'm only here because MIT didn't take me, and Carnegie Mellon only accepted me without funding."
Maybe he would be able to cry if the breakup had been more dramatic. He imagines that among normal people, losing a friend over a political or scientific argument (do normal people have scientific arguments?) usually involves some kind of vicious fight ("Trans women are men!" "Die, TERF scum!").
-Mark's social circle is far too civilized for that. Everyone wants to embody the spirit of [niceness, community, and civilization](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/)—and everyone knows game theory, so even if you're _not_ disposed to be nice, if you can _predict_ the outcome of a conflict, you can just implement that outcome directly without the costs of actually having to fight.
+Mark's social circle is far too civilized for that. Everyone wants to embody the spirit of [niceness, community, and civilization](http://web.archive.org/web/20200608154604/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/)—and everyone knows game theory, so even if you're _not_ disposed to be nice, if you can _predict_ the outcome of a conflict, you can just implement that outcome directly without the costs of actually having to fight.
So people cut ties peacefully. No vicious fights, no ill will. Just, _I like you and you haven't done anything wrong, but your vindictive attitude around this issue, while understandable, makes talking to you feel vaguely aversive to me; I don't want to hang out with you anymore._ And, _Okay, that's disappointing, but I understand; I like you, too._
Firstly, philosophers since the days of D. Hume have recognized the distinction between _is_ and _ought_, and have identified the [naturalistic fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) of direct inference from the former to the latter. That there exists a naturalistic explanation for the current state of affairs—and how could there _not_?—doesn't imply _anything_ about that state being good or just or worthy of being preserved.
-Secondly, not only does the nature _vs._ nurture dichotomy fail to hold up to basic scrutiny (the question has been compared to asking whether the area of a rectangle is caused more by its length or its width), it also isn't even adequate to the inferential work we tend to expect of it: [not everything biological is immuatable, and not everything social is easy to change.](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/) (Consider the case of [spelling reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform): no one would suggest that the myriad quirks of English orthography are _genetically_ determined, and yet the entirely social difficulties of getting everyone to coordinate on more logical spellings seem insurmountable.)
+Secondly, not only does the nature _vs._ nurture dichotomy fail to hold up to basic scrutiny (the question has been compared to asking whether the area of a rectangle is caused more by its length or its width), it also isn't even adequate to the inferential work we tend to expect of it: [not everything biological is immuatable, and not everything social is easy to change.](http://web.archive.org/web/20200606144056/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/) (Consider the case of [spelling reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform): no one would suggest that the myriad quirks of English orthography are _genetically_ determined, and yet the entirely social difficulties of getting everyone to coordinate on more logical spellings seem insurmountable.)
Maybe [Good Is Dumb](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb) doesn't _have_ to be [Truth in Television](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision). _I want to make the stupid dream real._ But to _get_ to the good world—whatever you think that is—
"Wow," she says, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"
-"Hold on," you say, "I'm not sure we should be disrespecting that effort by calling them _rubes_. [The categories were made for man, not man for the categories](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/): there's no rule of sorting saying that we should call them rubes, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that we should call them bleggs. And at a glance, they _look_ like bleggs—I mean, like the more-typical bleggs."
+"Hold on," you say, "I'm not sure we should be disrespecting that effort by calling them _rubes_. [The categories were made for man, not man for the categories](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/): there's no rule of sorting saying that we should call them rubes, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that we should call them bleggs. And at a glance, they _look_ like bleggs—I mean, like the more-typical bleggs."
Susan rolls her eyes at you, but apparently doesn't care enough to argue about it, so the two of you agree to call the modified hard objects _adapted bleggs_ and get back to work.
I'm certainly not _trying_ to say things that will hurt people—_least_ of all people who are mostly just like me but read different books in a different order and are living out a pretty decent approximation of _my wildest fantasy_.
-But if you try _not_ to say things that will hurt people, [you](https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bullying/) [end](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/22/ot9-the-thread-pirate-roberts/#comment-160689) [up](http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k) conceding the entire future history of the world to people on the basis of their being colonized by mind-viruses that make them the _easiest to hurt_.
+But if you try _not_ to say things that will hurt people, [you](https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bullying/) [end](http://web.archive.org/web/20200524145209/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/22/ot9-the-thread-pirate-roberts/#comment-160689) [up](http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k) conceding the entire future history of the world to people on the basis of their being colonized by mind-viruses that make them the _easiest to hurt_.
I don't want to live in that world.
And I guess that's the problem. People who assume a TERFy definition of _woman_—like, say, the authors of the Merriam–Webster dictionary [("noun, **1.a.**, an adult female person")](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman)—generally aren't trying to invalidate anyone's "gender"; they're trying to talk about _biological sex_ using simple, universally-understood words. Biological sex is obviously not the only category in the world: in a lot of situations, you might care more about whether someone has living children—or for that matter, whether an organism is yellow—than what sex it is.
-But when people _do_ want to talk about sex—when they want to carve reality along that _particular_ joint, without denying that there are [superexponentially](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words) many others in the vastness of configuration space—there's something _profoundly frustrating_ about [Blue Tribe](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) culture's axiomatic insistence that certain inferences _must not_ be made, that certain conceptual distinctions must not be _expressible_, except perhaps cloaked behind polysyllabic obfuscations like "assigned sex at birth" (as if the doctors made a _mistake_!).
+But when people _do_ want to talk about sex—when they want to carve reality along that _particular_ joint, without denying that there are [superexponentially](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words) many others in the vastness of configuration space—there's something _profoundly frustrating_ about [Blue Tribe](http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) culture's axiomatic insistence that certain inferences _must not_ be made, that certain conceptual distinctions must not be _expressible_, except perhaps cloaked behind polysyllabic obfuscations like "assigned sex at birth" (as if the doctors made a _mistake_!).
Even if many usages of words like _woman_ can and should be interpreted in a trans-inclusive sense, it's important that it also be possible to sometimes use the words in a trans-exclusive sense in those cases where the distributions of trans people and cis people of a given "gender" differ significantly for the variables of interest. The point is not to be mean to trans women (who are a huge fraction of my and _The Unit of Caring_ author's friends); the point is that it should be socially acceptable to _describe reality using words_.
These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very _specific_ miracles that depend on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.
-I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their blessed lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which [we can't write correct software](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), [aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even _exist_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/), and [don't remember how to go the moon](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/) or [build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). But while we work towards a better future (_n.b._, _work towards_, not _wait for_; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where [our means don't match our ambitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), and—as we typically recognize with respect to _other_ standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—
+I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their blessed lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which [we can't write correct software](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), [aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even _exist_](http://web.archive.org/web/20200210091741/https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/), and [don't remember how to go the moon](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/) or [build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile](http://web.archive.org/web/20200617220922/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). But while we work towards a better future (_n.b._, _work towards_, not _wait for_; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where [our means don't match our ambitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), and—as we typically recognize with respect to _other_ standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
>
> —_Distress_ by Greg Egan
-In ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or false in themselves, but rather can only be evaluated by their usefulness. Our finite minds being unable to cope with the unimaginable complexity of the raw physical universe, we group sufficiently similar things into the same category so that we can make similar [predictions](http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences) about them—but this requires not only a metric of "similarity", but also a notion of which predictions one cares about enough to notice, both of which are relative to some agent's perspective, rather than being inherent in the world itself.
+In ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or false in themselves, but rather can only be evaluated by their usefulness. Our finite minds being unable to cope with the unimaginable complexity of the raw physical universe, we group sufficiently similar things into the same category so that we can make similar [predictions](http://lesswrong.com/lw/i3/making_beliefs_pay_rent_in_anticipated_experiences) about them—but this requires not only a metric of "similarity", but also a notion of which predictions one cares about enough to notice, both of which are relative to some agent's perspective, rather than being inherent in the world itself.
And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't _wrong_ to classify whales as a type of _dag_ (typically translated as _fish_), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals are phylogenetically related. Similarly, borders between countries are agreed upon for a variety of pragmatic reasons, and can be quite convoluted. While there may often be some "obvious" geographic or cultural Schelling points anchoring these decisions, there's not going to be any intrinsic, eternal fact of the matter as to where one country starts and another begins.
-All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest sort of _Slate Star Codex_ reader to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on gerrymandered redefinitions of everyday concepts.
+All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://web.archive.org/web/20200529221511/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest sort of _Slate Star Codex_ reader to appeal to when they want to obfuscate and disrupt discussions about empirical reality by insisting on gerrymandered redefinitions of everyday concepts.
Alexander goes on to attempt to use the categories-are-relative-to-goals insight to rebut skeptics of transgenderedness:
A review of the empirical evidence for the two-type taxonomy is beyond the scope of this post. To interested or skeptical readers who only have time to read one paper, I recommend Lawrence's ["Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf); for a more exhaustive treatment, see the first two chapters of Lawrence's monograph [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf) or follow the links and citations in [Kay Brown's FAQ](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/).
-To avoid the main ideas of this post getting mired in _unnecessary_ controversy, I'd like to emphasize that it's possible to reject the hypothesis that autogynephilia is the _cause_ of the second type, while [still agreeing that](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/against-blanchardianism/) there observationally seem to be _at least_ two types of trans women, with the late-onset/non-exclusively-androphilic type or types being much less overtly feminine and not sharing the etiology of the early-onset/androphilic type.[ref]To be clear, I _do_ think autogynephilia has a causal role in late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but justifying that can be left to other posts; arguments can only be strengthened by leaving out [burdensome details](http://lesswrong.com/lw/jk/burdensome_details/).[/ref] Between the statistical signal in the psychology literature (I again defer to [Brown's review](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/)) and study of the public biographies of trans women (the life-arcs of people like Jenner or [the Wachowski sisters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wachowskis) _look different_ from those of people like [Janet Mock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Mock) or [Laverne Cox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverne_Cox)), I think this is hard to dispute.[ref]But for reference, some of the most popular critiques of the typology (often—I claim erroneously—cited as [debunkings](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/)) are [Serano 2010](http://www.juliaserano.com/av/Serano-CaseAgainstAutogynephilia.pdf) and [Moser 2010](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/moser-blanchards_autogynephilia_theory_a_critique.pdf).[/ref]
+To avoid the main ideas of this post getting mired in _unnecessary_ controversy, I'd like to emphasize that it's possible to reject the hypothesis that autogynephilia is the _cause_ of the second type, while [still agreeing that](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/against-blanchardianism/) there observationally seem to be _at least_ two types of trans women, with the late-onset/non-exclusively-androphilic type or types being much less overtly feminine and not sharing the etiology of the early-onset/androphilic type.[ref]To be clear, I _do_ think autogynephilia has a causal role in late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but justifying that can be left to other posts; arguments can only be strengthened by leaving out [burdensome details](http://lesswrong.com/lw/jk/burdensome_details/).[/ref] Between the statistical signal in the psychology literature (I again defer to [Brown's review](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/)) and study of the public biographies of trans women (the life-arcs of people like Jenner or [the Wachowski sisters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wachowskis) _look different_ from those of people like [Janet Mock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Mock) or [Laverne Cox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laverne_Cox)), I think this is hard to dispute.[ref]But for reference, some of the most popular critiques of the typology (often—I claim erroneously—cited as [debunkings](http://web.archive.org/web/20200609030501/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/13/debunked-and-well-refuted/)) are [Serano 2010](http://www.juliaserano.com/av/Serano-CaseAgainstAutogynephilia.pdf) and [Moser 2010](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/moser-blanchards_autogynephilia_theory_a_critique.pdf).[/ref]
I _am_, however, supposing that the late-onset type or types is either not an intersex condition, or at _most_, a very mild one: we could perhaps imagine a gender identity "switch" in the brain that can get flipped around (explaining the eventual need to transition) without much affecting other sexually-dimorphic parts of the brain (explaining how transition could be delayed so long, and come as such a surprise to others). This hypothesis is weaker than the autogynephilia theory, but still has implications for the ways in which transgender identity claims might or might not be validated by natural, prediction-motivated categorization schemes. If most trans women's traits are noticeably _not drawn from from the female distribution_, that's a factor making it less practical to insist that others categorize them as women.
<aside class="boxout"><strong>Figure.</strong> A schematic visualization of genderspace using fictitious but hopefully illustrative data <a href="/ancillary/categories-scatterplot-source/">(scatterplot source code)</a>. Suppose that the distributions of cis men (represented by the <span style="color: #1E90FF;">light blue</span> datapoints) and cis women (the <span style="color: #FF1493;">hot pink</span> points) have the same variance, but their means differ by 3.5 standard deviations in each of the <em>x₁</em>, <em>x₂</em>, and <em>x₃</em> variables, and that the distribution of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women (the <span style="color: #B000B0;">purple</span> points) is the same as that of cis men for the <em>x₁</em> and <em>x₂</em> variables, but resembles that of cis women for <em>x₃</em>. People who care more about predicting <em>x₁</em> and <em>x₂</em> have reason to prefer categories and corresponding language that group by natal sex (<span style="color: #0000C8;">blue</span> category boundary); people who care more about predicting <em>x₃</em> have reason to prefer categories and language that group by gender identity (<span style="color: #E00000;">red</span> boundary).</aside>
-In less tolerant places and decades, where MtF transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as (cis) women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference. This is why experienced crossdressers often report it being easier to pass in rural or suburban areas rather than cities with a larger LGBT presence—not as a matter of tolerant social attitudes, but as a matter of _base rates_: it's harder to get [clocked](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clocked&defid=4884301) by people who aren't aware that being trans is even a thing.[ref]In [predictive processing](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/) terms: the prediction errors caused by observations of a trans woman failing to match the observer's generative model of women get silenced for lack of alternative hypotheses if "She's trans" isn't in the observer's hypothesis space.[/ref]
+In less tolerant places and decades, where MtF transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as (cis) women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference. This is why experienced crossdressers often report it being easier to pass in rural or suburban areas rather than cities with a larger LGBT presence—not as a matter of tolerant social attitudes, but as a matter of _base rates_: it's harder to get [clocked](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clocked&defid=4884301) by people who aren't aware that being trans is even a thing.[ref]In [predictive processing](http://web.archive.org/web/20200527231354/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/) terms: the prediction errors caused by observations of a trans woman failing to match the observer's generative model of women get silenced for lack of alternative hypotheses if "She's trans" isn't in the observer's hypothesis space.[/ref]
-Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, transness is definitely known to be a thing—and in particular subcultures that form around [non-sex-balanced interests](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/), the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the [2018 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/03/ssc-survey-results-2018/), 9.4% of respondents selected _F (cisgender)_ for the gender question, compared to 1.4% of respondents selecting _F (transgender m → f)_. So, if trans women are women, _13.4%_ (!!) of women who read _Slate Star Codex_ are trans.
+Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, transness is definitely known to be a thing—and in particular subcultures that form around [non-sex-balanced interests](http://web.archive.org/web/20200619091119/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/), the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the [2018 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey](http://web.archive.org/web/20200602002139/https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/03/ssc-survey-results-2018/), 9.4% of respondents selected _F (cisgender)_ for the gender question, compared to 1.4% of respondents selecting _F (transgender m → f)_. So, if trans women are women, _13.4%_ (!!) of women who read _Slate Star Codex_ are trans.
I can't say this causes any problems, because that would depend on how you choose to draw the category boundaries around what constitutes a "problem." But objectively, injecting a substantial fraction of otherwise-mostly-ordinary-but-for-their-gender-dysphoria natal males into spaces and roles that developed around the distribution of psychologies of natal females _is_ going to have consequences—consequences that some of the incumbent women might not be happy about.
-A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of a very ["Blue Tribe"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) city's rationalist community[ref]_N.b._, basically the same group of people generating the _Slate Star Codex_ survey results just mentioned. Obviously, social circles not so heavily selected for the same [undefinable habits of thought](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) will have much less bizarre trans-to-cis-women ratios.[/ref] reports on recent changes in local social norms—
+A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of a very ["Blue Tribe"](http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) city's rationalist community[ref]_N.b._, basically the same group of people generating the _Slate Star Codex_ survey results just mentioned. Obviously, social circles not so heavily selected for the same [undefinable habits of thought](http://web.archive.org/web/20200428161537/https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/) will have much less bizarre trans-to-cis-women ratios.[/ref] reports on recent changes in local social norms—
> There have been "all women" things, like clothing swaps or groups, that then pre-transitioned trans women show up to. And it's hard, because it's weird and uncomfortable once three or four participants of twelve are trans women. I think the reality that's happening is women are having those spaces less—instead doing private things "for friends," with specific invite lists that are implicitly understood not to include men or trans women. This sucks because then we can't include women who aren't _already_ in our social circle, and we all know it but no one wants to say it.
-But this is a _terrible_ outcome with respect to _everyone's_ values. One can't even say, "Well, the cost to those bigoted cis women of not being able to have trans-exclusionary spaces is more than outweighed by trans women's identities being respected," because the non-passing trans women's identities _aren't_ being respected _anyway_; it's just that (cis) women are collectively too _nice_[ref]The sex difference in [Big Five](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits) Agreeableness [is around](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/) [_d_](https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cohen%27s_d)≈0.5.[/ref] to [make it common knowledge](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/).
+But this is a _terrible_ outcome with respect to _everyone's_ values. One can't even say, "Well, the cost to those bigoted cis women of not being able to have trans-exclusionary spaces is more than outweighed by trans women's identities being respected," because the non-passing trans women's identities _aren't_ being respected _anyway_; it's just that (cis) women are collectively too _nice_[ref]The sex difference in [Big Five](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits) Agreeableness [is around](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/) [_d_](https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Cohen%27s_d)≈0.5.[/ref] to [make it common knowledge](http://web.archive.org/web/20200427201543/https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/).
Another female friend of the blog writes:
All you can do is incentivize them to lie.
-This is the other problem with gender-as-self-identification: passing is hard and not-passing hurts, so kind-hearted people try to protect their trans friends from the pain of not being read the way that they would prefer—with the inevitable result that the laudable instinct to be kind gets corrupted into [universal socially-mandatory lies](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/). Even if you don't need predictively-natural categories for any particular practical decision—even if we were to collectively agree to integrate previously sex-segregated bathrooms and sports leagues and prisons so that no actual policy decision depended on what "gender" somebody is—as an aspiring [epistemic rationalist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/a-common-misunderstanding/), there's something spiritually deadening about a world in which the mental representations you need to _make sense_ of the world can't be spoken about without layers of obfuscating euphemisms.
+This is the other problem with gender-as-self-identification: passing is hard and not-passing hurts, so kind-hearted people try to protect their trans friends from the pain of not being read the way that they would prefer—with the inevitable result that the laudable instinct to be kind gets corrupted into [universal socially-mandatory lies](http://web.archive.org/web/20200428132642/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/). Even if you don't need predictively-natural categories for any particular practical decision—even if we were to collectively agree to integrate previously sex-segregated bathrooms and sports leagues and prisons so that no actual policy decision depended on what "gender" somebody is—as an aspiring [epistemic rationalist](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/02/a-common-misunderstanding/), there's something spiritually deadening about a world in which the mental representations you need to _make sense_ of the world can't be spoken about without layers of obfuscating euphemisms.
[Friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias [writes that the _Less Wrong_ community doesn't have a gender gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/)—we just have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap. (Gee, that makes me feel _so much better_.)
<a id="post-ideas-list"></a>
- * I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
+ * I still need to finish drafting my reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/)
* I've got ~4800 words drafted, but it needs a _lot_ more work in order to make it a maximally clear and maximally defensible blog post
* A _brief_ (only ~350 words) summary—
* I hopefully-accurately summarize Ozy as trying to make a _reductio ad absurdum_ argument, claiming that my arguments relying on the relevance of psychological sex differences would imply that lesbians aren't women, which is absurd.
So, I'm an intellectual. I _realize_ very well that "It's obviously not true" isn't an argument that someone could engage with. So I do make arguments. I try very hard to be careful to explain the empirical claims I'm making and point to evidence, and try to anticipate and disclaim in advance the most probable misinterpretations of what I'm saying, and demonstrate that I understand that words can be used in many ways depending on context, but that I'm trying to use language to point to a particular empirical statistical structure in the world, and that becomes a lot more cumbersome to express if I'm not allowed to use this word with this widely-used definition/[extension](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) ...
-I'm not perfect. Especially in real-time discussions (text or meatspace), I can often look back and point to things that I said that were wrong, and know that I have sinned: "Oh, that wasn't quite fair of me; oh, that was kind of [bravery-debatey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) of me; oh, I should have more carefully distinguished between those claims."
+I'm not perfect. Especially in real-time discussions (text or meatspace), I can often look back and point to things that I said that were wrong, and know that I have sinned: "Oh, that wasn't quite fair of me; oh, that was kind of [bravery-debatey](http://web.archive.org/web/20200618055932/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/) of me; oh, I should have more carefully distinguished between those claims."
I'm not perfect, but I think I'm _pretty good_. Even if I don't agree with someone about the facts—even if I don't agree with someone about what [policy trade-offs](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided) to make, including policy trade-offs about how to use language—surely, _surely_ we can at least agree on my meta-level point about _cognitive_ costs being part of the policy trade-off about how to use language?
>
> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
-At the end of [their reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.[ref]As teased at the beginning of [the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list), I _also_ have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in ["Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/). The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a [ludicrously, _miserably_ unproductive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the December 2019 (!) date of this one.)[/ref] What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
+At the end of [their reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](http://web.archive.org/web/20200610230130/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.[ref]As teased at the beginning of [the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list), I _also_ have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in ["Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/). The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a [ludicrously, _miserably_ unproductive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the December 2019 (!) date of this one.)[/ref] What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.[ref]_E.g._, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.[/ref]
If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence financially rewards the faithful" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubborn contrarianism that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.
-Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been _very_ good at maintaining frame control. I don't know exactly what forms this has taken historically, back when religious authorities held sway. In my secularized world which is at least nominally managed under the auspices of Reason, the preferred tactic is clever [motte-and-bailey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) language-mindfuckery games, justified by utilitarianism: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naïvely, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never, ever be proven false, because we can [define a word any way we want](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been _very_ good at maintaining frame control. I don't know exactly what forms this has taken historically, back when religious authorities held sway. In my secularized world which is at least nominally managed under the auspices of Reason, the preferred tactic is clever [motte-and-bailey](http://web.archive.org/web/20200529221511/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) language-mindfuckery games, justified by utilitarianism: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naïvely, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never, ever be proven false, because we can [define a word any way we want](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
-Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it [more expensive to express](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they [ought to be better than nothing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the [perceived need to appease](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) whichever [utility monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.
+Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it [more expensive to express](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they [ought to be better than nothing](http://web.archive.org/web/20200518035012/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the [perceived need to appease](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) whichever [utility monster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.
If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and therefore gain status by appealing to reality, and our minds are better at [tracking](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/01/advice-isnt-about-info.html) [status](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/12/forged-by-status.html) than [reality](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/06/doing-good-being-good.html), then eventually dissidents either accept [the narrative](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/resisting-the-narrative/) or destroy themselves.
But the ancestors, in choosing the words to carve _their_ reality at the joints, didn't distinguish between the fact of sex, and social sex _roles_—from _within_ a given Society, there was no reason to make that distinction. For a brief, beautiful moment in the West, second-wave feminism's push to make Society [more congenial to masculine-of-center women](http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861) provided a reason, giving us the sex/gender distinction.
-<a id="blue-egregore"></a>That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of [female intrasexual competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition) (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic).
+<a id="blue-egregore"></a>That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of [female intrasexual competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition) (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic).
<a id="re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction"></a>Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex).
"I really don't think you're rationally considering how to maximize your contribution to rationality pedagogy and deciding it runs through freaking out about transgender and maybe abandoning the movement in disgust."
-"_Almost no one's_ optimal contribution to rationality pedagogy runs through freaking out about transgender; I just think it's plausible that _mine_ does. It is written that [power comes from having Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect): the [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) were distilled out of Eliezer Yudkowsky's attempt to think carefully about how to build a superintelligence; the classic _Slate Star Codex_ posts on [argumentative charity](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/) were born out of Scott Alexander's [trauma after accidentally running afoul](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/) of social-justice activists.
+"_Almost no one's_ optimal contribution to rationality pedagogy runs through freaking out about transgender; I just think it's plausible that _mine_ does. It is written that [power comes from having Something to Protect](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect): the [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) were distilled out of Eliezer Yudkowsky's attempt to think carefully about how to build a superintelligence; the classic _Slate Star Codex_ posts on [argumentative charity](http://web.archive.org/web/20200110071406/https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/12/youre-probably-wondering-why-ive-called-you-here-today/) were born out of Scott Alexander's [trauma after accidentally running afoul](http://web.archive.org/web/20200612024112/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/12/a-response-to-apophemi-on-triggers/) of social-justice activists.
"If Eliezer had _started out_ trying to write about human rationality, if Scott had _started out_ trying to write about discourse norms, _it wouldn't have worked_. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion."
I think this strategy is sympathetic but [ultimately ineffective](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/). Murray is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while denying the possibility of any [unfortunate implications](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) of the orthodoxy being false. It's like ... [theistic evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution): satisfactory as long as you _don't think about it too hard_, but among those with a high [need for cognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition), who know what it's like to truly believe (as I once believed), it's not going to convince anyone who hasn't _already_ broken from the orthodoxy.
-Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood." I _strongly_ agree with the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
+Murray concludes, "Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood." I _strongly_ agree with the _moral sentiment_, the underlying [axiology](http://web.archive.org/web/20200416104807/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/) that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
And yet I have been ... [trained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/teaxCFgtmCQ3E9fy8/the-martial-art-of-rationality). Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism [to even that which is most sacred](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points). Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—[to the _process_ underlying my _current best guess_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) as to that which is most sacred. If that which was believed to be most sacred turns out to not be entirely coherent ... then we might have some philosophical work to do, to [_reformulate_ the sacred moral ideal in a way that's actually coherent](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility).
Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this "intelligence" construct, and how it's heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, _&c._, and how Society is becoming increasingly stratified by cognitive abilities, as school credentials become the ticket to the new upper class.
-This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
+This _should_ just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone _and her dog_ is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", and Chapter 14, "Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ". So, _apparently_, different ethnic/"racial" groups have different average scores on IQ tests. [Ashkenazi Jews do the best](http://web.archive.org/web/20200620184942/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/), which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I'm [only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe)](/images/ancestry_report.png) explains my low IQ. ([I got a 131](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) on the [WISC-III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Intelligence_Scale_for_Children) at age 10, but that's pretty dumb [compared to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/06/the-view-from-below/) some of my [robot-cult](/tag/my-robot-cult/) friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/"whites". And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen's _d_ ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by _d_ = 1 on some measurement that's normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to "play up" group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn't be [relevant](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GSz8SrKFfW7fJK2wN/relevance-norms-or-gricean-implicature-queers-the-decoupling). As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in _The Anatomy of Racial Inequality_, cognitive abilities decline with _age_, and yet we don't see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed by the white majority as an "us"—our mothers and fathers—rather than an outgroup. _Individual_ differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because "smart people" as a group aren't construed as a natural political coalition—although Murray's work on cognitive class stratification would seem to suggest this intuition is mistaken.
I believe that knowledge is useful, and that there are [_general_ algorithms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms)—patterns of thinking and talking—that produce knowledge. You can't just get _one_ thing wrong—every wrong answer comes from a bug in your _process_, and there's an infinite family of other inputs that could trigger the same bug. [The calculator that says `6 + 7 = 14`](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to) isn't just going to mislead you if you use it to predict what happens when you combine a stack of ●●●●●● pennies and a stack of ●●●●●●● pennies—it's _not a calculator_. The function-that-it-computes is _not arithmetic_.
-I am not particularly intelligent man. If I ever seem to be saying true and important things that almost no one else is saying, it's not because I'm unusually insightful, but because I'm unusually bad at keeping secrets. There are ... _operators_ among us, [savvy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) Straussian motherfuckers who know and see everything I can, and more—but who think [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) that [not everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/).
+I am not particularly intelligent man. If I ever seem to be saying true and important things that almost no one else is saying, it's not because I'm unusually insightful, but because I'm unusually bad at keeping secrets. There are ... _operators_ among us, [savvy](http://web.archive.org/web/20200428132642/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/) Straussian motherfuckers who know and see everything I can, and more—but who think [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) that [not everybody knows](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/).
And I guess ... I think it matters? [One of the evilest reactionary bloggers mentioned the difference](https://blog.jim.com/economics/draining-the-swamp-2/) between a state religion that requires you to believe in the unseen, and one that requires you to disbelieve in what is seen. My thesis is that a state religion that requires you to fluidly doublethink around the implications of "Some women have penises", will also falter over something even the Straussians have [to protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/). But I can't prove it.
I mean, it's an explanation, but that's different from an excuse: being a jerk [has consequences](https://xkcd.com/1357/), and you need to take the consequences like a man.
-This, then, is the mindset of a soldier (though our [beautiful cutting weapons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) be words instead of swords): to inflict pain, to incur guilt—and yet to have [only tactical](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2020/02/relationship-outcomes-are-not-particularly-sensitive-to-small-variations-in-verbal-ability/) regrets. Given the chance to do it all over again, you would—but solely to be more skillful in projecting rhetorical force to secure the objective, to say more clearly what _needed to be said_. Not to inflict less pain or incur less guilt.
+This, then, is the mindset of a soldier (though our [beautiful cutting weapons](http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) be words instead of swords): to inflict pain, to incur guilt—and yet to have [only tactical](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2020/02/relationship-outcomes-are-not-particularly-sensitive-to-small-variations-in-verbal-ability/) regrets. Given the chance to do it all over again, you would—but solely to be more skillful in projecting rhetorical force to secure the objective, to say more clearly what _needed to be said_. Not to inflict less pain or incur less guilt.
The thing is, [the various "flatten the curve" propaganda charts](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22flatten+the+curve%22&tbm=isch) illustrating the idea didn't label their axes and depicted the "hospital system capacity" horizontal line above, or at most slightly below, the peak of the flattened curve, suggesting a scenario where mitigation efforts that merely slowed down the spread of the virus through the population would be enough to avoid disaster. Turns out, [when you run the numbers, that's too optimistic](https://medium.com/@joschabach/flattening-the-curve-is-a-deadly-delusion-eea324fe9727): at the peak of a merely mitigated epidemic, there will be many times over more people who need intensive care, than ICU beds for them to get it. These cold equations [suggest a more ambitious goal of "containment"](https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56): _lock everything down_ as hard as we need to in order to get <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> below 1, and scurry to get enough testing, contract-tracing, and quarantining infrastructure in place to support gradually restarting the economy without restarting the outbreak.
-The discussion goes on (is it feasible to callibrate the response that finely?—what of the economic cost? _&c._)—and that's what impresses me; that's what I'm grateful for. _The discussion goes on_. Sure, there's lots of the usual innumeracy, cognitive biases, and sheer wishful thinking, but when there's no strategic advantage to "playing dumb"—there's no pro-virus [coalition that might gain an advantage if we admit out loud that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) they said something true—you can see people actually engage each other with [the full beauty of our weapons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/), and, sometimes, _change their mind in response to new information_. The "flatten the curve" argument isn't "false" exactly (quantitatively slowing down the outbreak will, in fact, quantitatively make the overload on hospitals less bad), but the pretty charts portraying the flattened curve safely below the hospital capacity line were _substantively misleading_, and it was possible for someone to spend a bounded _and small_ amount of effort to explain, "Hey, this is substantively misleading because ..." and _be heard_, to the extent that [the people who made one of the most popular "flatten the curve" charts published an updated version reflecting the new argument](https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/14-03-2020/after-flatten-the-curve-we-must-now-stop-the-spread-heres-what-that-means/).
+The discussion goes on (is it feasible to callibrate the response that finely?—what of the economic cost? _&c._)—and that's what impresses me; that's what I'm grateful for. _The discussion goes on_. Sure, there's lots of the usual innumeracy, cognitive biases, and sheer wishful thinking, but when there's no strategic advantage to "playing dumb"—there's no pro-virus [coalition that might gain an advantage if we admit out loud that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting) they said something true—you can see people actually engage each other with [the full beauty of our weapons](http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/), and, sometimes, _change their mind in response to new information_. The "flatten the curve" argument isn't "false" exactly (quantitatively slowing down the outbreak will, in fact, quantitatively make the overload on hospitals less bad), but the pretty charts portraying the flattened curve safely below the hospital capacity line were _substantively misleading_, and it was possible for someone to spend a bounded _and small_ amount of effort to explain, "Hey, this is substantively misleading because ..." and _be heard_, to the extent that [the people who made one of the most popular "flatten the curve" charts published an updated version reflecting the new argument](https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/14-03-2020/after-flatten-the-curve-we-must-now-stop-the-spread-heres-what-that-means/).
This level of performance is ... not to be taken for granted. Take it from me.
You can't spell narcisstic rage without cis.
-http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/
+http://web.archive.org/web/20200618164529/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/
my choosing to quit HRT makes me less legit
But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
-So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Starting with the shared canon of knowledge of [cognitive biases](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnZbHi873v9vcpGpZ/what-s-a-bias-again), [reflectivity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection), and [Bayesian probability theory](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/)—and [not just out of a duty towards some philosophical ideal of Truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth), but as a result of understanding _how intelligence works_.
+So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Starting with the shared canon of knowledge of [cognitive biases](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jnZbHi873v9vcpGpZ/what-s-a-bias-again), [reflectivity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection), and [Bayesian probability theory](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/technical/) bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](http://web.archive.org/web/20200526142416/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/)—and [not just out of a duty towards some philosophical ideal of Truth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqvnWFtRD2keJdwjX/the-useful-idea-of-truth), but as a result of understanding _how intelligence works_.
Oh, and there was also [this part about](https://intelligence.org/files/AIPosNegFactor.pdf) how [the entire future of humanity and the universe depended on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile) our figuring out how to reflect human values in a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence. That part's complicated.
> I'm curious about what nontrivial features of progressivism you think overlap with the central characteristics of the cluster of things described as religions. [Every cause wants to be a cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult), and more broadly every set of beliefs wants to punish dissent ("Oh, you're one of those plebs who likes Marvel movies?"), so what makes either politics in general or progressivism in particular especially religionlike?
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/
+http://web.archive.org/web/20200222181925/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/why-do-atheists-believe-in-religion/
Okay, three years lat—three _months_, three _months_ later, let me say it was too optimistic of me to have [suggested that public discourse was working with respect to pandemic response](/2020/Mar/relative-gratitude-and-the-great-plague-of-2020/). I was pointing at _something_ real with that post—there is _some_ subgraph of the network of the world that's interested in doing serious cognition to minimize horrible suffocation deaths, but which is overwhelmingly _not_ interested in ...
-But it's a _small_ subgraph. It is written that every improvement is necessarily a change, but not every change is an improvement. When the center of collective narrative gravity shifts, that _could_ be the homing device of our [beautiful weapons](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) converging on the needle of Truth in the haystack of thought, but it could just be the blind thrashing of Fashion.
+But it's a _small_ subgraph. It is written that every improvement is necessarily a change, but not every change is an improvement. When the center of collective narrative gravity shifts, that _could_ be the homing device of our [beautiful weapons](http://web.archive.org/web/20200521005958/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/) converging on the needle of Truth in the haystack of thought, but it could just be the blind thrashing of Fashion.
The Smart Subgraph [sounding the alarm](https://putanumonit.com/2020/02/27/seeing-the-smoke/) might have been an input into authorities calling for a half-measured lockdown ("lockdown")—which was only enough to push <em>R<sub>0</sub></em> [slightly below 1](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/04/30/covid-19-4-30-stuck-in-limbo/). That might have bought us time if we had any [live players](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/live-versus-dead-players-2b24f6e9eae2) who could do the test-trace-quarantine scurrying we fantasized about, but it doesn't look like that's a thing.
[TODO: but I'm most angry about Hsu]
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/
+http://web.archive.org/web/20200514120734/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/06/asymmetric-weapons-gone-bad/
J. K. Rowling
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2020/05/28/connecticut-transgender-policy-found-to-violate-title-ix
https://www.wnpr.org/post/us-government-wont-recognize-connecticut-transgender-athletes-right-compete-females
https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1084628483748184064
-test case: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/12/clarification-to-sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/
+test case: http://web.archive.org/web/20200111125910/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/12/clarification-to-sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/
https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
—
--- /dev/null
+import os
+import re
+import requests
+import sys
+
+
+slate_sturl_regex = re.compile(r"https?://slatestarcodex.com/\d{4}/\d{2}/\d{2}/[-a-z0-9]+/")
+
+
+def slate_starchive_post_content(content):
+ slate_star_links = slate_sturl_regex.finditer(content)
+ revised = content
+ for match in slate_star_links:
+ link_url = match.group()
+ archive_response = requests.get(
+ "http://archive.org/wayback/available?url={}".format(link_url)
+ )
+ try:
+ archive_url = archive_response.json()['archived_snapshots']['closest']['url']
+ except KeyError:
+ print(
+ "didn't successfully get an archive link for {}: {}".format(
+ link_url, archive_response.text
+ )
+ )
+ else:
+ print("replacing \033[93m{}\033[0m with \033[92m{}\033[0m".format(link_url, archive_url))
+ revised = revised.replace(link_url, archive_url)
+ return revised
+
+
+def tree(root):
+ for path, _dirs, filenames in os.walk(root):
+ for filename in filenames:
+ if not filename.endswith(".md"):
+ continue
+ filepath = os.path.join(path, filename)
+ with open(filepath) as f:
+ print("examining {}".format(filepath))
+ content = f.read()
+ revised = slate_starchive_post_content(content)
+ if revised != content:
+ with open(filepath, 'w') as g:
+ print("revising {}".format(filepath))
+ g.write(revised)
+
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+ tree(sys.argv[1])
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff