memoir: some fine details to the parts about "Helen" and Sophia

Writing is impossible! (Even little parts of the story that don't
"really matter" have all sorts of little details to them—I added a
point to the far editing tier where I still don't think I got this
right—and I want to explain the details correctly because I think it's
a cute window onto the tapestry of my life, but if I spend too long on
every detail, then I'm not going to finish telling the Whole Dumb
Story before the world ends)

diff --git a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
index 360c548..e67f259 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
+++ b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md
@@ -387,11 +387,13 @@ She said she would recommend _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ on her Facebook wall.
 
 As an afterthought to an explanation of why she thought successfully transitioning is more feasible than I seemed to believe, she suggested a folkloric anti-dysphoria exercise: look at women you see in public, and try to pick out which features /r/gendercritical would call out in order to confirm that she's obviously a man.
 
-I replied that "obviously a man" is unsophisticated. I had been thinking of gendering in terms of [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes): you observe some features, use those to assign (probabilities of) category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about whatever other features you might care about but can't immediately observe. Sure, it's possible for an attempted clocking to be mistaken, and you can have gender categories such that AGP trans women aren't "men", but they're still not drawn from anything close to the same distribution as cis women.
+I replied that "obviously a man" is unsophisticated. I had been thinking of gendering in terms of [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes): you observe some features, use those to assign (probabilities of) category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about whatever other features you might care about but can't immediately observe. Sure, it's possible for an attempted clocking to be mistaken, and you can have third-gender categories such that AGP trans women aren't "men", but they're still not drawn from anything close to the same distribution as cis women.
 
-She replied with an information-theoretic analysis of passing (which I would [later adapt into a guest post with her gracious permission](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/)). If the base rate of AGP transsexualism in Portland was 0.1%, someone would need log<sub>2</sub>(99.9%/0.1%) ≈ 9.96 ≈ 10 bits of evidence to clock her as trans. Thus, the prospect of passing in naturalistic settings is a different question from whether there exists evidence that a trans person is trans. There _is_ evidence—but who cares, as long as it's comfortably under 10 bits?
+Sophia replied with an information-theoretic analysis of passing (which I would [later adapt into a guest post with her gracious permission](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/)). If the base rate of AGP transsexualism in Portland was 0.1%, someone would need log<sub>2</sub>(99.9%/0.1%) ≈ 9.96 ≈ 10 bits of evidence to clock her as trans. If the structure of one's face was 4 times more likely to be from a male than a female, that would only contribute 2 bits. Sophia was 5′7″, which is about where the female and male height distributions cross over, so she wasn't leaking any bits there. And so on—the prospect of passing in naturalistic settings is a different question from whether there exists evidence that a trans person is trans. There _is_ evidence—but as long as it's comfortably under 10 bits, it won't be a problem.
 
-I agreed that for most people in most everyday situations it probably didn't matter. _I_ cared because I was a computational philosophy of gender nerd, I said, [linking to a program I had written](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Persongen/blob/8fc03d3173/src/main.rs) to simulate sex classification based on personality, using data from [a paper about sex differences in the "facets" underlying the Big Five personality traits](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/). Sophia was impressed, but had some cutting methodological critiques. The paper had given the residuals of each facet against the other, so I assumed you could sample one, and then use the residual stats to get a "diff" from one to the other. Sophia pointed out that you can't actually use residuals for sampling like that, because the actual distribution of the residual was highly dependent on the first facet. Given an unusually high value for one facet, taking the overall residual stats as independent would imply that the other facet was equally likely to be higher or lower, which was absurd.
+I agreed that for most people in most everyday situations it probably didn't matter. _I_ cared because I was a computational philosophy of gender nerd, I said, [linking to a program I had written](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Persongen/blob/8fc03d3173/src/main.rs) to simulate sex classification based on personality, using data from [a paper by Weisberg _et al._ about sex differences in the correlated "facets" underlying the Big Five personality traits](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/). (For example, studies had shown that women and men didn't differ in Big Five Extraversion, but if you split "Extraversion" into "Enthusiasm" and "Assertiveness", there were small sex differences pointing in opposite directions, with men being more assertive.) My program generated random examples of women's and men's personality stats according to Weisberg _et al._'s data, and then tried to classify the "actual" sex of each example given only the personality stats—only reaching 63% accuracy, which was good news for androgyny fans like me.
+
+Sophia was impressed, but had some cutting methodological critiques. The paper had given [residual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors_and_residuals) statistics of each facet against the other—like the mean and standard deviation of Enthusiasm _minus_ Assertiveness—so I assumed you could randomly generate one facet, and then use the residual stats to get a "diff" from one to the other. Sophia pointed out that you can't actually use residuals for sampling like that, because the actual distribution of the residual was highly dependent on the first facet. Given an unusually high value for one facet, taking the overall residual stats as independent would imply that the other facet was equally likely to be higher or lower, which was absurd. Sophia built her own model in Excel using the correlation matrix from the paper, and found a classifier with 68% accuracy.
 
 ------
 
@@ -431,7 +433,7 @@ As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman who I'll call "Chaya", whose marria
 
 I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I soon let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
 
-She sent me a photo of the key snapped in half (proving that it was unusable, to satisfy my security anxiety) and told me to go away.
+She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off, next to set of pliers (which had presumably done the snapping), and told me to go away.
 
 ------
 

diff --git a/notes/memoir-sections.md b/notes/memoir-sections.md
index bd56e76..17eb4af 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/memoir-sections.md
+++ b/notes/memoir-sections.md
@@ -20,6 +20,12 @@ marked TODO blocks—
 ✓ Rob's thread, first contact with Ben [pt. 2]
 ✓ A/a alumna consult details [pt. 2]
 
+✓ touch up Persongen explanation [pt. 2]
+✓ touch up "Helen" key photo explanation
+_ explain date with "Noreen"
+_ October 11th posts
+_ explain fight with "Noreen" et al.
+
 - Eliezerfic fight: Big Yud tests me [pt. 6]
 _ Eliezerfic fight: derail with lintamande [pt. 6]
 _ Eliezerfic fight: knives, and showing myself out [pt. 6]
@@ -118,7 +124,8 @@ _ Anna's claim that Scott was a target specifically because he was good, my coun
 _ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
 
 far editing tier—
-_ facet/residual Persongen explanation could use some work
+_ didn't "Helen" also send me $8 for the key, and the bank statement had her deadname on it?
+_ re Persongen, footnote or sentences about how I knew I was wrong to use naïve-Bayes on facets, but I didn't know what was right
 _ squeeze "Darkness and Light" into the Eliezerfic account
 _ clarify Sarah dropping out of the coordination group
 _ somewhere in dath ilan discussion: putting a wrapper on graphic porn is fine, de-listing Wikipedia articles is not