--- /dev/null
+Title: Book Review: Abigail Shrier's <em>Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters</em>
+Date: 2021-01-01 05:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: review (book), rapid-onset gender dysphoria, politics
+
+So, I like this book a lot. I just wish I lived in a world where I didn't _have_ to like this book a lot. As you can guess from the subtitle, _Irreversible Damage_ is not a work of careful, nuanced scholarship of the kind you would expect to be reviewed by such a refined blog as _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ ([previously](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), [previously](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/)). No, _Irreversible Damage_ is a work of sensationalist right-wing journalism. But damned if the situation on the ground doesn't call for more sensationalist right-wing journalism!
+
+Well, maybe.
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2b-negative-causes-are-frivolous
What was I thinking? Maybe I should just delete it all to spare myself the embarrassment. In any case, this is an information-theory fanblog now! Gender?—I barely _know_ her.
-Let _V_ be a random variable over the sample space {0,1}<sup>20</sup>, the twenty-dimensional space of binary vectors.
-
-
-and suppose that P(V = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]) = ½, P(V = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]), and P(_V_ = _v_) = 0 for all other _v_ ∈ {0,1}<sup>20</sup>.
+Let _V_ be a random variable over the sample space {0,1}<sup>20</sup>, the twenty-dimensional space of binary vectors, and suppose that P(V = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]) = ½, P(V = [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]), and P(_V_ = _v_) = 0 for all other _v_ ∈ {0,1}<sup>20</sup>.
"I can easily imagine being a villain, in a nearby possible world in which my analogue read different books in a different order," is—or should be—a deeply unsettling thought.
-In all philosophical strictness, a [physicalist](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/) universe such as our own isn't going to have some objective morality that all agents are compelled to obey, but even if there is necessarily _some_ element of subjectivity in that we value (say) sentient life rather than (say) [tiling the universe with diamonds](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/), we usually expect morality to at least not be completely arbitrary: we want to _argue_ that a villain is in the _wrong_ because of _reasons_, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her.
+In all philosophical strictness, a [physicalist](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/) universe such as our own isn't going to have some objective morality that all agents are compelled to obey, but even if there is necessarily _some_ element of subjectivity in that we value sentient life rather than [tiling the universe with diamonds](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/diamond_maximizer/), we usually expect morality to at least not be completely arbitrary: we want to _argue_ that a villain is in the _wrong_ because of _reasons_, rather than simply observing that she has her values, and we have ours, and we label ours "good" and hers "evil" because we're us, even though she places those labels the other way around because she's her.
If good and evil aren't arbitrary, but our _understanding_ of good and evil depends on which books we read in what order, and which books we read in what order _does_ seem like an arbitrary historical contingency, then how do we _know_ our sequence of books led us to actually being in the right, when we would have predictably thought otherwise had we encountered the villain's books instead?—how do we break the symmetry? If the villain is at all smart, she should be asking herself the same question.
+
+
+
[We each see the other as bulldozing the territory to fit a preconcieved map]
\ No newline at end of file
Main path (important posts)—
+
_ Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
_ Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception (LW)
_ Motivation and Political Context for My Philosophy of Language Agenda
UUT—
-_ The One Where I Try to Be A Little More Explicit About What 'Autogynephilia' Actually Entails
+_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
_ Beyond the Binary
_ A Previous Life's War
_ I, Too, Dislike It
-_ No One Actually Wants to Change "Gender"
_ The Feeling Is Mutual
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
+_ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi
+
+_ The One Where I Try to Be A Little More Explicit About What 'Autogynephilia' Actually Entails
+_ No One Actually Wants to Change "Gender"
_ Ideology Is the General Case (working title)
_ Boundary Violations and Territory
_ three views on partisanship: "Hierarchy and Wings" "Bioleninism" "Democracy Cis and Trans"
_ "I Hope You're Happy, California"
_ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title)
_ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
-_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
_ Answers on Great Divides: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/questions-for-great-divides.html
_ Film Review: Your Name
_ World of Masks https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1228093035042541569
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff