"I Tell Myself" Monday morning drafting before dayjob

I'll be a bit late, but I could argue that it's actually worth it from
my employer's perspective that I come in to work ready to focus rather
than being in pain because I haven't written anything.

diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
index 29bd690..61ca624 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
+++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
@@ -499,3 +499,8 @@ I would have hoped you'd be proud of me, as your (mass correspondence-course) st
  People who spend their entire lives on the receiving end of the calm voice of [authority-backed-by-implied-violence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/29/reflections-from-the-halfway-point/) might be justified in thinking that Slate Star mistake-theoretic ideals like "reason" and "debate" are for suckers: that's what their distribution of training data actually looks like!
 
 https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7gkv/what_happened_to_me_and_why_i_think_women_need/
+
+Archive links—
+Extropians "changing sex is difficult" https://archive.is/En6qW
+
+The _original_ meaning of the word "woman" points to a cluster in

diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
index c1759e7..46e3184 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
+++ b/notes/i-tell-myself-sections.md
@@ -1,19 +1,22 @@
 As an illustration of how the hope for radical human enhancement is [fraught with technical difficulties](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.
 
-It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact that post had on me. 
+It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on this blog eight times. In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 mailing list post](http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html) that was its predecessor. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for content by the Great Teacher that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
 
-http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html
-[it's hard to overstate the impact this one post had on me (I've already linked it 8 times on this blog)]
+The argument goes:
 
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-Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?
+Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill?
 
-Okay, I understand that in Berkeley 2020, that probably sounds like some kind of reactionary political statement. But try taking it _literally_, as a _factual claim_ about the world. Men (adult human males) who _fantasize about_ being women (adult human females), are still neverless drawn from the _male_ multivariate trait distribution, not the female distribution.
+Okay, I understand that in Berkeley 2020, that probably sounds like some kind of reactionary political statement, probably intended to provoke. But try interpreting it _literally_, as a _factual claim_ about the world. Men (adult human males) who _fantasize about_ being women (adult human females), are still neverless drawn from the _male_ multivariate trait distribution, not the female distribution.
 
-Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill!
+It seems useful to be able to _express this claim in natural language_. I can phrase the claim in more or fewer words, using a greater or lesser amount of caveats, qualifications, or polysyllabic obfuscations, depending on the audience's sensibilities and what aspects of my model I want to call attention to. But I need to be able to talk about the model _somehow_, and talking about the model becomes _more expensive_ if I'm not occasionally allowed to use the phrase "actual woman" in a context where _you know goddamned well_ what I mean by it.
 
-It seems useful to be able to express this claim in natural language? "The trait distribution of trans women isn't identical to that of cis women" does not _convey the same meaning_.
+I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing.
+
+"The trait distribution of trans women isn't identical to that of cis women" does not _convey the same meaning_. Those words do not encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that we don't know how to change with current technology.
+
+The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in _simple language_ without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem, because [...]
 
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