After some recent Twitter and Discord discussions, I'm still amazed at how well my "only Nixon could go to China" effect continues to hold up: everyone is respectfully sympathetic to the poor self-hating trans woman even when her _whole bit_ is specifically about explaining why that frame is delusional. (When anyone else making the same points would have been dismissed as hateful.)
-Is it my nuance, originality, and nonpartisanship? I can play the philosophy-of-language mind games with the best of them—better, I think—and am clearly doing _more work_ than copying the standard appeals to fourth-grade biology from the TERF cache. (And _showing your work_ matters even if postgraduate biology and artificial intelligence eventually concludes that fourth-grade biology basically had the right idea.) If it's the nuance, that _bodes well_ for broadening the topic scope of the blog.
+Is it my nuance, originality, and relative nonpartisanship? I can play the philosophy-of-language mind games with the best of them—better, I think—and am clearly doing _more work_ than copying the standard appeals to fourth-grade biology from the TERF cache. (And showing your work matters even if postgraduate biology and artificial intelligence eventually concludes that fourth-grade biology basically had the right idea.) If it's the nuance, that bodes well for broadening the topic scope of the blog.
-But I don't think that's all of it; somehow I doubt whether anti-feminist women and black Republicans have it this easy. (Or even non-feminist women and black libertarians, if nonpartisanship is a factor.) Some would say it's my white male privilege—but I have another theory.
+But I don't think that's all of it; somehow I doubt whether anti-feminist women and black Republicans have it this easy. (Or even merely non-feminist women and black libertarians, if nonpartisanship is a factor.) Some would say it's my white male privilege—but I have another theory.
-Maybe people _still think they can crack my egg_. Phyllis Schlafly and Hermain Cain's eligibility markers were immutable—having already left the coalition of the marginalized, there was nothing that could be changed to induce them to come back. Whereas my pre-eligibility status gives me the _option_ to be marked, which would change my incentives. If I have to _keep_ [putting the "cis" in "decision"](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) every day, the coalition can still hope to [offer me a better deal](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) should my alignment falter.
+Maybe people _still think they can crack my egg_. Phyllis Schlafly and Hermain Cain's eligibility markers were immutable—having already left the coalition of the marginalized, there was nothing that could be changed to induce them to come back. Whereas my pre-eligibility status gives me the _option_ to be marked—which would change my incentives. If I have to _keep_ [putting the "cis" in "decision"](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) every day, the coalition can still hope to [offer me a better deal](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) should my current alignment falter.
Title: Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
-Date: 2021-03-14 11:00
+Date: 2021-03-21 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek
Status: draft
_(Part 1 of 3)_
Two-dimensional _images_ of people are _vastly_ simpler than the actual people themselves in the real physical universe. But _in theory_, a lot of the same _mathematical principles_ would apply to hypothetical future nanotechnology-wielding AI systems that could, like the AI in "Failed Utopia #4-2", synthesize a human being from scratch (this-person-_didn't_-exist-dot-com?), or do a real-world sex transformation (PersonApp?)—and the same statistical morals apply to reasoning about sex differences in psychology and (which is to say) the brain.
-Daphna Joel _et al._ [argue](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) [that](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) human brains are "unique 'mosaics' of features" that cannot be categorized into distinct _female_ and _male_ classes, because it's rare for brains to be "internally consistent"—female-typical or male-typical along _every_ dimension. It's true and important that brains aren't _discretely_ sexually dimorphic the way genitals are, but as [Marco del Guidice _et al._ point out](http://cogprints.org/10046/1/Delgiudice_etal_critique_joel_2015.pdf), the "cannot be categorized into two distinct classes" claim seems false in an important sense. The lack of "internal consistency" in Joel _et al._'s sense is exactly the behavior we expect from multivariate normal-ish distributions with different-but-not-vastly-different means. (There aren't going to be many traits where the sexes are like, _four_ or whatever standard deviations apart.) It's just like how sequences of flips of a Heads-biased and Tails-biased coin are going to be unique "mosaics" of Heads and Tails, but pretty distinguishable with enough flips—and indeed, with the right stats methodology, [MRI brain scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/).
+Daphna Joel _et al._ [argue](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) [that](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) human brains are "unique 'mosaics' of features" that cannot be categorized into distinct _female_ and _male_ classes, because it's rare for brains to be "internally consistent"—female-typical or male-typical along _every_ dimension. It's true and important that brains aren't _discretely_ sexually dimorphic the way genitals are, but as [Marco del Giudice _et al._ point out](http://cogprints.org/10046/1/Delgiudice_etal_critique_joel_2015.pdf), the "cannot be categorized into two distinct classes" claim seems false in an important sense. The lack of "internal consistency" in Joel _et al._'s sense is exactly the behavior we expect from multivariate normal-ish distributions with different-but-not-vastly-different means. (There aren't going to be many traits where the sexes are like, _four_ or whatever standard deviations apart.) It's just like how sequences of flips of a Heads-biased and Tails-biased coin are going to be unique "mosaics" of Heads and Tails, but pretty distinguishable with enough flips—and indeed, with the right stats methodology, [MRI brain scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/).
Sex differences in the brain are like sex differences in the skeleton: anthropologists can tell female and male skeletons apart (the [pelvis is shaped differently](https://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/sexual-dimorphism-pelvis), for obvious reasons), and [machine-learning models can see very reliable differences that human radiologists can't](/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf), but neither sex has entire _bones_ that the other doesn't, and the same is true of brain regions. (The evopsych story about complex adaptations being universal-up-to-sex suggests that sex-specific bones or brain regions should be _possible_, but in a bit of _relative_ good news for antisexism, apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Um, in humans—a lot of other mammals actually have [a penis bone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum).)
Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? (Well, maybe two or three.) When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
+[TODO: if I did transition, and I did pass, and someone said, "I've never met a woman quite like you"]
+
I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fantatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."
I said, "I like characters and stories! I think."
It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them).
-It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private matters—like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights), and everyone I used to trust telling blatant pants-on-fire lies about their _own_ philosophy of language that were clearly optimized to trick me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off which determines whether or not I should cut my dick off).
+It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private matters—like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights), and everyone I used to trust telling _blatant pants-on-fire lies_ about their _own_ philosophy of language that were clearly optimized to _trick me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off which determines whether or not I should cut my dick off).
But such an absurd scenario couldn't actually happen, right? Um, to be continued.
Pre-emptive dismissal as "unrepresenative" is incoherent: if it's not representative, how are you guessing what about I'm say?
https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/644563577202704384/your-experiences-are-not-universal-theory-of
+
+https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes
+
+
+> the gray tribe gets its color by being the ashen waste of the blue tribe. Burned up in the misfortune of trying to actually compile the blue tribe source code
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/m0abd1/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_08_2021/gqvg6kv/
+
+----
+
+copied from old conversation with "Wilhelm"—
+
+the gender ratio between open-source vs. corporate software is pretty striking (~2% vs. ~20%); a hard-reactionary might argue, "women can't code, corporate women programmers are living in an astroturfed world and don't actually accomplish anything useful", whereas a more moderate position might be, "the sex difference in engineering aptitude is pretty small and women can do it fine when the appropriate incentives are there for them, but only men enjoy competing with each other for Internet Status Points"
+
+even where people have evidence from personal experience, that evidence gets interpreted through the haze of ideology (for better or for worse); Katie lived through her husband transitioning, but she didn't have the framework to make sense of it until she talked to me
+
+I was genuinely surprised by the race/IQ literature back in 2007; it wasn't that I was quietly knowledge-falsifying beforehand
+
+> one man's moderate is another man's radical when you have political inferential distance
+
+----
+
+I said: "Medical treatments aren't going to be harmful, or not-harmful as an objective binary; it's a cost-benefit thing. And things like osteoporosis risk, tenous thromboembolism risk, infertility, SRS complication risk, and the sheer inconvenience of being a lifelong medical patient are costs"
+Someone in Discord said: I'll take those risks over the risk of suicide any day
+
+... but that's if you've been sold the idea that don't-transition→suicide, which has been selected for emotional blackmail rather than being true
+
+----
+
+https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/
+
+https://4thwavenow.com/2021/03/16/dutch-puberty-blocker-pioneer-stop-blindly-adopting-our-research/
-_ Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
-_ Amulet
+- Amulet
_ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point
-_ Link: "AGPs! GROW A PAIR AND POLICE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_qFxtJ7pxw Karen Davis
+_ Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
2021+ significant posts—
-_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data (April?)
-_ A River in Egypt
-_ Annals of the Category War; Or, A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
-_ Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (May?)
-_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (June?)
+_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
+_ A River in Egypt (part 2)
+_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning (part 3)
+_ Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism
+_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America
LW—
+_ Angelic Irony
+_ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
_ Overlapping Distributions and Cancellable Stereotypes; Or, The Information Theory of Adjectives
- And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
_ importance of getting the direction of causality right
_ Multi-Level Moloch; Or, Technically, the Holocaust Was a Coordination Success
_ Reasons to Go On
+
+
_ E.Y. as case study on unconscious-lying and self-report ("their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints" https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228)
_ Reddit: /r/philosophy, /r/TheMotte, /r/theschism, /r/SneerClub
_ tags: "The SF Bay Area", "Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement", "Postmortems & Retrospectives"
+_ Complicity (how do reasonable people cooperate with each other instead of dumb people in their own coalition)
+_ reinterpretting all of Hannah Montana album lyrics as an AGP narrative
_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
_ Stereotypes are weak probabilistic inferences (Agreeableness d~0.5), category-membership is strong inference, the same word/signal hits both, but stereotypes are (or should be) easy to cancel; shifting default meaning onto stereotypes in order to suit trans (while still having the word attach to something) is a bad trade
_ Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
- Amy Wax linkpost
- The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
_ follow to "Point Man": prosletyzing religion
+_ Larmarckian Transmission of FtM?!
strict scrutiny
_ Ideology Is the General Case (working title)
_ Boundary Violations and Territory
_ three views on partisanship: "Hierarchy and Wings" "Bioleninism" "Democracy Cis and Trans"
-
+_ Link: "AGPs! GROW A PAIR AND POLICE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_qFxtJ7pxw Karen Davis
_ Gay + Trans = Straight
_ Too Big to Fail
_ Orc-ham's Razor
Resolved: publish "Sexual Dimorphism" soon as just the first part, the political coda is too hard to finish in a timely manner and will have to be a separate post
TODO for "Sexual Dimorphism"—
+_ Never met a woman like you
+
+_ transformation details matter: accents and homonyms, sexual orientation changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC
+
_ morality and culturally-defined values
_ Vassar clapback anecdote
_ playing dumb initials anecdote
+
+
+
_ AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2" (but phrased in a way that's agnostic about
_ EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_"
_ more empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
(Where "girls" are the ones with a vagina, breasts, _&c._)
-changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC
+
/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/
This comment in particular is really something—
https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/
+
+
+> At least, I have a MASSIVE home territory advantage because I can appeal to Eliezer's writings from 10 years ago, and ppl can't say "Eliezer who? He's probably a bad man"
+
+> Makes sense... just don't be shocked if the next frontier is grudging concessions that get compartmentalized
+
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/03/our-default-info-system-status-and-gossip.html
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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/when-your-epistemic-bubble-pops-unlocked
+
+Shrier says, "It is not uncommon for young children periodically to express the desire to be the opposite sex" footnote goes to: Zucker Bradley Sanikhani "Sex Differences in Referral Rates of Children With Gender Identity Disorder: Some Hypotheses"
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