But ... anyone who's read _and understood_ Alexander's work should be able to infer that Scott probably finds it plausible that there exist genetically-mediated ancestry-group differences in socially-relevant traits (as a value-free matter of empirical Science with no particular normative implications): for example, his [review of Judith Rich Harris](https://archive.ph/Zy3EL) indicates that he accepts the evidence from [twin studies](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#twin-studies) for individual behavioral differences having a large genetic component, and section III. of his ["The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/) indicates that he accepts genetics as an explantion for group differences in the particular case of cognitive ability in Ashkenazi Jews.[^murray-alignment]
-[^murray-alignment]: And as far as aligning himself with Murray more generally, Alexander had tapped Murray for Welfare Czar in [a hypothetical "If I were president" Tumblr post](https://archive.vn/xu7PX).
+[^murray-alignment]: And as far as aligning himself with Murray more generally, it's notable that Alexander had tapped Murray for Welfare Czar in [a hypothetical "If I were president" Tumblr post](https://archive.vn/xu7PX).
There are a lot of standard caveats that go here that Scott would no doubt scrupulously address if he ever chose to tackle the subject of genetically-mediated group differences in general: [the mere existence of a group difference in a "heritable" trait doesn't itself imply a genetic cause of the group difference (because the groups' environments could also be different)](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#heritability-caveats). It is without a doubt _entirely conceivable_ that the Ashkenazi IQ advantage is real and genetic, but black–white IQ gap is fake and environmental.[^bet] Moreover, group averages are just that—averages. They don't imply anything about individuals and don't justify discrimination against individuals.
[^murray-caveat]: For example, the introductory summary for Ch. 13 of _The Bell Curve_, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability", states: "Even if the differences between races were entirely genetic (which they surely are not), it should make no practical difference in how individuals deal with each other."
-Why do I keep repeatedly bringing this up, that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ reader)?
+Why do I keep repeatedly bringing this up, that "rationalist" leaders almost certainly believe in cognitive race differences (even if it's hard to get them to publicly admit it in a form that's easy to selectively quote in front of _New York Times_ readers)?
Because one of the things I noticed while trying to make sense of why my entire social circle suddenly decided in 2016 that guys like me could become women by means of saying so, is that in the conflict between the "rationalist" Caliphate and mainstream progressives, the "rationalists"' defensive strategy is one of deception.
It works surprisingly well. I fear my love of Truth is not so great that if I didn't have Something to Protect, I would have happily participated in the cover-up.
-As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (_We_ think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a generous handful of Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Alruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but survey data doesn't unambiguously back this up.
+As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the progressive egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (_We_ think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a generous handful of Asians, exactly as you'd expect from chapters 13 and 14 of _The Bell Curve_.) [Subjectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic), I felt like the sex balance got a little better after we hybridized with Tumblr and Effective Alruism (as [contrasted with the old days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but survey data doesn't unambiguously back this up.[^survey-data]
-(We go from 89.2% male in the [2011 _Less Wrong_ survey](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results) to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the [2020 _Slate Star Codex_ survey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/)—although the [2020 EA survey](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics) says only 71% male, so it depends on how you draw the category boundaries of "we.")
+[^survey-data]: We go from 89.2% male in the [2011 _Less Wrong_ survey](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k/2011-survey-results) to a virtually unchanged 88.7% male on the [2020 _Slate Star Codex_ survey](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/20/ssc-survey-results-2020/)—although the [2020 EA survey](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ThdR8FzcfA8wckTJi/ea-survey-2020-demographics) says only 71% male, so it depends on how you draw the category boundaries of "we."
But _trans!_ We have plenty of trans people to trot out as a shield to definitively prove that we're not counter-revolutionary right-wing Bad Guys! (Alexander joked in April 2016 that ["We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup).) Thus, [Jacob Falkovich noted](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) (on 23 June 2020, just after _Slate Star Codex_ went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders", and Scott Aaronson [noted (in commentary on the February 2021 _Times_ article) that](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
To this, I'll agree that the problems shouldn't be confused. Psychology is complicated, and people have more than one reason for doing things: I can easily believe that Brennan was largely driven by bully-like motives even if he told himself a story about being a valiant whistleblower defending Cade Metz's honor against Scott's deception.
-But I think it's also important to _notice both problems_, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy on account of Brennan being an evil bully.
+But I think it's also important to _notice both problems_, instead of pretending that the only problem was Brennan's disregard for Alexander's privacy.
It's one thing to believe that people should keep promises that they, themselves, explicitly made. But instructing commenters not to link to the email seems to imply not just that Brennan should keep _his_ promises, but that _everyone else_ is obligated to participate in a conspiracy to conceal information that Alexander would prefer concealed. I can see an ethical case for it, analogous to returning stolen property after it's already been sold, and expecting buyers not to buy items that they know have been stolen. (If Brennan had obeyed Alexander's confidentiality demand, we wouldn't have an email to link to, so if we wish Brennan had obeyed, we can just _act as if_ we don't have an email to link to.) But also I think expecting people to _pretend not to know things_ is a _big ask_, not something you can casually demand.
[^polygenic-score]: Better, actually: [the heritability of IQ is around 0.65](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ), as contrasted to [about 0.33 for cancer risk](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26746459/).
-[^ai-transition-go-well]: Natural selection eventually developed intelligent creatures, but evolution didn't know what it was doing and was not foresightfully steering the outcome in any particular direction. The more humans know what we're doing, the more our will determines the fate of the cosmos, the less we know what we're doing, the more our civilization is just another primordial soup for the next evolutionary transition.
+[^ai-transition-go-well]: Natural selection eventually developed intelligent creatures, but evolution didn't know what it was doing and was not foresightfully steering the outcome in any particular direction. The more humans know what we're doing, the more our will determines the fate of the cosmos; the less we know what we're doing, the more our civilization is just another primordial soup for the next evolutionary transition.
-But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is making it look less likely that we'll get that much time.
+But pushing on embryo selection only makes sense as an intervention for optimizing the future if AI timelines are sufficiently long, and the breathtaking pace (or too-fast-to-even-take-a-breath pace) of the deep learning revolution is so much faster than the pace of human generations, that it's starting to look unlikely that we'll get that much time. If our genetically uplifted children would need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers, but unaligned AI is on track to end the world in twenty years, we would need to start having those children _now_ in order for them to make any difference at all.
-If our genetically uplifted children need at least twenty years to grow up to be productive alignment researchers,
+[It's ironic that "longtermism" got some traction as the word for the "EA" cause of benefitting the far future](https://applieddivinitystudies.com/longtermism-irony/), because the decision-relevant beliefs of most of the people who think about the far future work out to extreme short-termism.
+Common-sense longtermism—a longtermism that assumed there's still going to be a world of recognizable humans in 2123—_would_ care about eugenics, and would be willing to absorb political costs today in order to fight for a saner future. The story of humanity would not have gone _better_ if Galileo had declined to publish his theories for fear of the Inquisition.
-[TODO—
+But if you think the only hope for there _being_ a future flows through maintaining influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing, declining to contradict the state religion makes more sense—if you don't have _time_ to win a culture war, because you need to grab hold of the Singularity (or perform a [pivotal act](https://arbital.com/p/pivotal/) to prevent it) _now_.
- * If you have short timelines, and want to maintain influence over what big state-backed corporations are doing, self-censoring about contradicting the state religion makes sense. There's no time to win a culture war; we need to grab hold of the Singularity now!!
-
- * So isn't there a story here where I'm the villain for not falling in line and accepting orders? Aren't I causing damage, losing dignity points for our Earth, by criticizing Yudkowsky so harshly, when actually the rest of the world should listen to him more about the coming robot apocalypse?
-
-]
+[...]
> [_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake._
>
Author: Zack M. Davis
Date: 2023-01-01 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
> I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly be the first time I've found myself in the vulnerable position of sharing the brain-damaged prophet's impairment, down to the last neuron.
[^cluster-learning-capability]: The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.
-There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but a good theory to the precision that our theories about how to engineer bridges are good) would be described by (say) a 70-node [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), but it turns out that some of [the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/), such that stupid humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, do manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".[^lucky-simplification]
+There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but as good as our theories about how to engineer bridges) would be described by (say) a 70-node [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), but it turns out that some of [the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/), such that stupid humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, do manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".[^lucky-simplification]
[^lucky-simplification]: In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much. For example, [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/jp9rmn/there_is_probably_no_ftm_typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because the various causes of gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age.
[I claim that femininity and autogynephilia are two such anti-correlated nodes in the True Causal Graph](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). They're anti-correlated because they're both children of the sexual orientation node, whose value pushes them in _opposite directions_: gay men are more feminine than straight men,[^gay-femininity], and autogynephiles want to be women because we're straight.
-[^gay-femininity]: [It's a stereotype for a reason!](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) If you want Science, see [Lippa 2000](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) or [Bailey and Zucker 1995](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).
+[^gay-femininity]: [It's a stereotype for a reason!](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) If you're justly not satisfied with stereotypes and want Science, see [Lippa 2000](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) or [Bailey and Zucker 1995](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).
Sex-atypical behavior and the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought are two different _reasons why_ transition might genuinely seem like a good idea to someone—different paths through the causal graph leading the decision to transition. Maybe they're not mutually exclusive, and probably there are lots of other contributing factors, such that a strict interpretation of the two-type taxonomy is false. If some particular individual trans woman writes down her life story, and swears up and down that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize at all with the experiences I've grouped under the concept of "autogynephilia", I don't have any definitive knockdown proof with which to accuse her of lying, because I don't _know_ her, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model of it.
-Title: Selected Annotations I Wrote in the Margins of My Copy of Imogen Binnie's <em>Nevada</em>
+Title: Book Review: Imogen Binnie's <em>Nevada</em>
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, review (book)
[...]
--------
-
-[Steph is Maria's cis girlfriend.]
-
-> She acts like she's into it. She's thrashing, hands at Steph's wrists, pulling. Not that hard, although <u>Steph is probably stronger than Maria</u>, so it's not like Maria could
-
-less probable than Imogen Binnie would like us to believe
-
-> Then it's Maria's turn. She already knows she's going to fake it. Maria's relationship to her body, it's a mess, she can barely get it together to be naked in front of anybody, much less get off with someone in the room. You'd think it would be impossible to fake it, with junk like Maria's got, but you can. Maria knows some stuff about faking it. One time somebody told her that when she came in their motuh, they could tell she'd come because when that pre-<u>come</u> stuff turned into regular come, it got saltier.
-
-I thought the noun was [spelled differently](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cum#Etymology_2)
-
-> People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men, at least, until they save up their money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman. Or something? But Maria is like, Dude, hi. <u>Nobody ever reads me as trans any more.</u> Old straight men hit on me when I'm at work and in all these years of transitioning I haven't even been able to save up for a decent pair of boots.
-
-that you know of (& James will, in Part 2)
-
-> But when she started working there, she was like, Hello, I'm a dude and my name is the same as the one that's on my birth certificate. Then when she had been working there a year or two, she had this kind of intense and scary realization that for a really long time, as boring and clichéd as this is, but for as long as she could remember she had felt all fucked up.
->
-> So she wrote about it. She laid it out and connected all these dots: the sometimes I want to wear dresses dot, the <u>I am addicted to masturbation dot</u>, the I feel like I have been punched in the stomach when I see an un-self-conscious pretty girl dot, the I cried a lot when I was little and don't think I've cried at all since puberty dot. Lots of other dots. A constellation of dots. The oh man do I get more fucked up than I mean to, every time I start drinking dot. The I might hate sex dot. So she figured out that she was trans, told people she was changing her name, got on hormones, it was very difficult and rewarding and painful.
-
-really
-
-> There's this whole thing now where <u>rich</u> young white people like Maria colonize Brooklyn history because in these messed-up, post-modern times everybody is desperate for something real
-
-is this code for class? Maria works in a bookstore
-
-> She doesn't hate trans guys who are working on the fact that they've acquired male privilege outside the queer community, but also in a weird way inside the queer community, especially in the way that their presence tends to eclipse or eliminate or invalidate that of trans women, so they're working on it and starting conversations about it and <u>being accountable to trans women</u>.
-
-/r/GenderCritical would "love" this book
-
-[Steph has disclosed that she cheated with Kieran, a trans man.]
-
-> She probably doesn't even hate Steph. Like, as a couple they are fucked, and obviously Maria sucks at changing things her life that she really needs to change. Such as: she totally needs to break up with Steph. But for real though, Steph rules. She and Keiran, y'know, that sort of thing just happens sometimes, especially in a queer relationship, right? And it's not like Maria never fucked Kieran while she was with Steph.
-
-what
-
-<u>what</u>
-
-> Maria's been <u>mentally outlining a zine</u> about this stuff that will lay it out clearly and solve everything since, like, before she started transitioning.
-
-ARTISTS SHIP
-
-> He managed to kind of fuck her with a packer in a tiny, dirty yellow bathroom downstairs in the Burritoville on Second and Sixth. She managed to keep her skirt on the whole time and not to let him touch her junk. She certainly didn't come. Maybe he did.
-
-what does this entail, exactly
-
-> Turns out Piranha texted Maria last night, too. Fuck. Mostly her texts are just a bunch of cussing, because Piranha knows that Maria likes cuss words. She's a good friend. But last night she was like, <u>Dude</u>, where are you? Maria texts back: Sorry <u>dude</u>. Hang out soon?
-
-interesting choice of address
-
-> Maria used to have a pretty strong body, back when she was an energetic little college kid who looked like a dude and <u>journaled obsessively about gender in top secret notebooks all day every day</u>.
-
-!!! [I did this, too.]
-
-> She wakes up around four thirty and feels rested. Do other people feel like this all the time? It's fucked up. Her head feels all clear and she thinks for a second about pouring herself a glass of breakfast wine, but then she thinks, no this is perfect! I have four hours until I have to be at work, which means I can shave, put on makeup, then go to Kellogg's and <u>write for two and a half hours</u>. As the sun is coming up, no less.
-
-<a href="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg"><img src="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
-
-maybe I shouldn't doubt her work ethic
-
-> She has another sip and opens her notebook, <u>one of those fancy Moleskine fuckers</u> Hemingway used to write in even though Hemingway and his patriarchal, strong silent type can suck a dick.
-
-❤ ✶ Moleskine ★ ☆
-
-> She doesn't actually write or diagram or make a list or anything. She doodles.
-
-I take back what I said about work ethic
-
-> Maria was <u>this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes</u> she'd met when she'd been telling everyone [she was a] straight dude too
-
-[Underlined without comment.]
-
-> In one of <u>Michelle Tea's</u> books (maybe The Chelsea Whistle?) she writes this thing about how coffee is the greatest thing in the world, it makes your eyes bug out, it makes you want to write and produce and create and it's like speed except, something something, who can remember exact quotes. Maria's like, I'll get it tattooed on my forearm so I can remember it.
-
-who has a blurb on the back cover of this book—<u>quid pro quo</u>?
-
-> She buys a small coffee and gives the girl her driver's license to get a computer. It's weird but <u>nobody has ever once given Maria</u> shit for the gender on her license, not in the <u>five years</u> or whatever that she's been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law.
-
-that is surprising—is this detail autobiographical?
-
-> No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so if everybody, so it's not very interesting.
-
-so true
-
-> She doesn't post there as much as she used to but she still has that blog. People read it. Kids who are figuring out that they're trans look up to her. It's kind of nice although since there are so few decent resources for trans women that aren't for rich trans women or boring trans women, sometimes being the big sister is exhausting.
-
-it's even worse for gender-dysphoric males who don't buy the "trans" framing
-
-> Her name is Julia Serano and like most figureheads, she's very smart and sweet and right-on and <u>almost entirely unproblematic</u>, but her acolytes totally get obnoxious, taking her writings as doctrine.
-
-high praise
-
-> I know, Maria says. I just ... I've been thinking about trans stuff, like, all the time, and I don't feel like I can talk to anybody about it, because <u>I totally fucking hate everybody else who's trans</u>, and I don't want to deal with it.
-
-I know the feeling
-
-> But she's on the couch, in her work clothes, with a bottle of organic red wine because she knows that <u>estradiol and non-</u><span class="extra-underline">organic</span><u> red wine don't mix</u>
-
-somehow I doubt this
-
-> Maria reads so much that <u>she assumes that one day she'll have an idea and put together a Great Anti-American Novel or two</u>
-
-unfortunately, it doesn't work like that ("assume a novel")
-
-> <u>Rain rules</u>. She's all ebullient, and weirdly <u>can't wait for her lunch break so she can write in her journal again</u>.
-
-I remember those days
-
-> On top of which, <u>you dated what, three, maybe four girls before you transitioned?</u>
-
-better than me
-
-> On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out. You thought you were into it, you definitely liked the orgasms. It's not like you had any reason you knew about to be mad at your junk, but jacking off was always way easier and less stressful than actually getting and maintaining an erection when somebody else was there.
-
-yes
-
-> She gets a three-dollar drip coffee and gives the barista her license. She doesn't look at it, but she's <u>got dyke hair so she probably wouldn't care if she saw the M</u>.
-
-TERFs are a minority of dykes
-
-> She's been trying to get into it but she can't focus. It's a <u>story about a girl in New York</u> who's a knight, and she's friends with a dog, or something. <u>It's weird. She feels like you could just flip to a page and start reading. There's no plot.</u>
-
-yeah, <u>those</u> books, right
-
-[Steph is reminiscing about her relationship with Maria.]
-
-> But it turns out that <u>using your partner basically as a sex toy to get yourself off</u>—suspending disbelief and convincing yourself that she's hot for you, that she's into it—is even lonelier than never getting off.
-
-<u>usually</u> it's the trans woman in the relationship doing this—author projection??
-
-> <u>Who knows what Maria is hot for, what kind of kinks she has</u>. <u>Maria herself probably doesn't know</u>.
-
-yes, who knows??
-
-> No matter how clear Steph has been about <u>the fact that no kink could possibly be too shameful to admit</u>, even something horrifying you'd never actually want to do in real life, Maria won't fess up to anything.
-
-well, I can think of <u>one</u> ...
-
-> One time Steph observed that Maria tends not to be very performy, and <u>when she is performy, it's almost always for herself</u>, not for anyone else.
-
-★ ♡ [[I'm like this](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/#narrative-optimization), too.]
-
-[A description of James H.'s girlfriend, Nicole.]
-
-> When she was fourteen or fifteen she bought a copy of Bitch magazine at Thanks Books at the base of the mountain on the east side and it was all downhill: classic feminist awakening stuff. Dots started connecting. The righteous fury about having to wear a dress to chruch when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.
->
-> She was the sixteen-year-old talking about Andrea Dworkin at the lunch table. Suddenly it made sense to fantasize about making out with Jason Sanger, the floppy-haired second-string kicker on the football team, and then knocking him over instead of marrying him. Basically she could see through misogynist rape culture and didn't want anything to do with it. She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn't work. She would try to think about Kathleen Hanna or Princess Leia or Scarlett Johanson when she jacked off, but no luck. At the last second they'd turn into Jason Sanger and his arms, his legs, his smirk and his tiny little butt.
-
-a novel about Nicole would be better than this one, but Imogen Binnie couldn't write it
-
-> It was a major dilemma until one day, at the lunch table, humorless feminist nonfiction tome on the table in front of her, she noticed James for the first time. Like, noticed noticed. <u>Hair to his shoulders</u>, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy, sitting at a table with Mark Richardson, probably talking about weed.
-
-check
-
-[Part 2, Chapter 5 describes James's autogynephilia.]
-
-this chapter is <u>so real</u>
-
-> <u>It's not like James is proud</u> of the pron that he looks at, but what are you supposed to do? Will yourself not to be a pervert? He's tried. He's still trying. He tries most nights.
-
-try being proud?
-
-> One blog is devoted entirely to quote unquote Scientific Transformations, so like, it will be a picture of a pretty girl in a space station with a caption that reads, Professor MacMillan stepped out of the body regenerator and his assistant smirked at the error. Or whatever. Like the premise is always nanorobots, or body switching machines, or like, who even knows? Gender-change rayguns. There are just all these pictures of women with captions explaining that they used to be men. <u>It's stupid that these are supposed to be, like, scientific</u>, because obviously science that can turn you into Pamela Anderson isn't science anyone is working on. There are archives of these things that go way back into the history of the internet but that shit is not science, it is fucking magic.
-
-<u>yes</u>
-
-> If you're a straight guy who's into the idea of being turned into a girl there's not a lot of girls who are interested in being involved in that, probably.
-
-[TODO: cry emoji]
-
-> Lots of other fetishes or whatever, like, you can frame them as cool. People can look cool getting tied up and whipped. People can look cool pissing on each other, even. Imagine if Nine Inch Nails put that in a video. You could make that cool. But wanting to be a girl? Not even like, I have known my whole life, man trapped in the body of a woman, whatever. Anyone can tell you that James is not a woman. James knows who Jennifer Finney Boylan is, and <u>he is no Jennifer Finney Boylan</u>. He's just some fuckin dude who wishes he was allowed to wear dresses.
-
-Jenny Boylan who married a woman & transitioned at 42? You might have more in common with her than you think!
-
-> This is how James knows he's an autogynephiliac instead of a transvestite. Cross-dressing seems exciting in theory but in practice it is the saddest and most disappointing thing in the world.
-
-so real
-
-> That should have been the end of his career as a transvestite, but the next night Nicole was doing something else, who knows what, so he didn't jack off all day and then he tried the dress on again at like eleven o'clock and managed to come that time, but it felt even worse than jacking off while reading stupid Internet caption porn. Like, he came, but there was barely even an orgasm, and there was no euphoria, and then he was just like, What the hell. Am I not a transvestite? Do I not like dresses? Do I have <u>a fetish that you cant' even do in real life</u>, like being turned on by being eaten by slutty giants?
-
-[Underlined without comment.]
-
-> As soon as Maria Griffiths sees James Hanson in the Star City, Nevada Wal-Mart she's like, That kid is trans and <u>he</u> doesn't even know it yet.
-
-★
-
-> Because if he's being totally honest with himself, on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans and while he hasn't processed what that means yet he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her. Like not even sexual. Just like, I want to be your Facebook friend or something. I need to grab you, to have you in my life. Whatever.
-
-★
-
-
-
--------
-
the next time someone tell you AGP is rare
And ask them, "Have you read _Nevada_?"
-
https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nevada-imogen-binnie-transgender/
-
smaller TODO blocks—
-✓ Comp joke [pt. 4]
-✓ or consider Nevada [pt. 2]
-✓ anti-correlated variables [pt. 2]
-- previous AI milestones [pt. 4]
-_ short timelines and politics [pt. 4]
-_ social justice and defying threats [pt. 4]
+✓ previous AI milestones [pt. 4]
+✓ short timelines and politics [pt. 4]
_ "victories" weren't comforting [pt. 3]
_ vaccine joke [pt. 4]
-_ "If Clarity" recap intro [pt. 3]
-_ "Agreeing with Stalin" recap intro [pt. 4]
_ Scott linked to Kay Brown [pt. 2]
_ posted to /r/gendercritical [pt. 2]
_ the Death With Dignity era [pt. 4]
+_ social justice and defying threats [pt. 4]
+_ "If Clarity" recap intro [pt. 3]
+_ "Agreeing with Stalin" recap intro [pt. 4]
bigger blocks—
_ dath ilan and Eliezerfic fight
+_ reaction to Ziz
+_ Dolphin War finish
_ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
_ psychiatric disaster
With internet available—
+_ historical accuracy of Gallileo
+_ explain the "if the world were at stake" _Sword of Good_ reference better
+_ a poem I wrote in the _Less Wrong_ comments in 2011
_ "not hard to find": link to more /r/itsafetish-like anecdotes
_ stats of SIAI vs. SingInst hits (for ^siai footnote)
_ Yudkowsky on AlphaGo
_ Yudkowsky's LW moderation policy
far editing tier—
+_ mention Will MacAskill's gimped "longtermism" somehow
_ re-read a DALL-E explanation and decide if I think it's less scary now
_ Scott Aaronson on the blockchain of science https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6821
_ footnote previous race-IQ baiting on "why do I keep bringing this up"
> We passed word to the Fake Conspiracy section of Exception Handling, and they've spent the last few hours quickly planting evidence consistent with how Civilization should look if the Sparashki are real. The notion being that their apparent fictional status and licensing is just a cover, so Sparashki can walk around if they have to and just get compliments on their incredible cosplay. Since this event is medium-secret, the CEO of Yattel's Less Expensive Tunneling Machines has been photographed by surprise through a window, looking like a Sparashki, to explain why conspiracy-theoretic research is suddenly focusing there and turning up the evidence we've planted."
https://glowfic.com/replies/1860952#reply-1860952
+
+
+the generic experience is that the future is more capable but less aligned, and we basically expect this to continue
+people from the past would envy our refrigeration, vaccines, infinite food, &c., but that doesn't mean they would regard our value-drifted-with-respect-to-them culture as superior
+paperclipping is just that turned up to 11 (well, 10¹¹)
--- /dev/null
+[Steph is Maria's cis girlfriend.]
+
+> She acts like she's into it. She's thrashing, hands at Steph's wrists, pulling. Not that hard, although <u>Steph is probably stronger than Maria</u>, so it's not like Maria could
+
+less probable than Imogen Binnie would like us to believe
+
+> Then it's Maria's turn. She already knows she's going to fake it. Maria's relationship to her body, it's a mess, she can barely get it together to be naked in front of anybody, much less get off with someone in the room. You'd think it would be impossible to fake it, with junk like Maria's got, but you can. Maria knows some stuff about faking it. One time somebody told her that when she came in their motuh, they could tell she'd come because when that pre-<u>come</u> stuff turned into regular come, it got saltier.
+
+I thought the noun was [spelled differently](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cum#Etymology_2)
+
+> People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men, at least, until they save up their money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman. Or something? But Maria is like, Dude, hi. <u>Nobody ever reads me as trans any more.</u> Old straight men hit on me when I'm at work and in all these years of transitioning I haven't even been able to save up for a decent pair of boots.
+
+that you know of (& James will, in Part 2)
+
+> But when she started working there, she was like, Hello, I'm a dude and my name is the same as the one that's on my birth certificate. Then when she had been working there a year or two, she had this kind of intense and scary realization that for a really long time, as boring and clichéd as this is, but for as long as she could remember she had felt all fucked up.
+>
+> So she wrote about it. She laid it out and connected all these dots: the sometimes I want to wear dresses dot, the <u>I am addicted to masturbation dot</u>, the I feel like I have been punched in the stomach when I see an un-self-conscious pretty girl dot, the I cried a lot when I was little and don't think I've cried at all since puberty dot. Lots of other dots. A constellation of dots. The oh man do I get more fucked up than I mean to, every time I start drinking dot. The I might hate sex dot. So she figured out that she was trans, told people she was changing her name, got on hormones, it was very difficult and rewarding and painful.
+
+really
+
+> There's this whole thing now where <u>rich</u> young white people like Maria colonize Brooklyn history because in these messed-up, post-modern times everybody is desperate for something real
+
+is this code for class? Maria works in a bookstore
+
+> She doesn't hate trans guys who are working on the fact that they've acquired male privilege outside the queer community, but also in a weird way inside the queer community, especially in the way that their presence tends to eclipse or eliminate or invalidate that of trans women, so they're working on it and starting conversations about it and <u>being accountable to trans women</u>.
+
+/r/GenderCritical would "love" this book
+
+[Steph has disclosed that she cheated with Kieran, a trans man.]
+
+> She probably doesn't even hate Steph. Like, as a couple they are fucked, and obviously Maria sucks at changing things her life that she really needs to change. Such as: she totally needs to break up with Steph. But for real though, Steph rules. She and Keiran, y'know, that sort of thing just happens sometimes, especially in a queer relationship, right? And it's not like Maria never fucked Kieran while she was with Steph.
+
+what
+
+<u>what</u>
+
+> Maria's been <u>mentally outlining a zine</u> about this stuff that will lay it out clearly and solve everything since, like, before she started transitioning.
+
+ARTISTS SHIP
+
+> He managed to kind of fuck her with a packer in a tiny, dirty yellow bathroom downstairs in the Burritoville on Second and Sixth. She managed to keep her skirt on the whole time and not to let him touch her junk. She certainly didn't come. Maybe he did.
+
+what does this entail, exactly
+
+> Turns out Piranha texted Maria last night, too. Fuck. Mostly her texts are just a bunch of cussing, because Piranha knows that Maria likes cuss words. She's a good friend. But last night she was like, <u>Dude</u>, where are you? Maria texts back: Sorry <u>dude</u>. Hang out soon?
+
+interesting choice of address
+
+> Maria used to have a pretty strong body, back when she was an energetic little college kid who looked like a dude and <u>journaled obsessively about gender in top secret notebooks all day every day</u>.
+
+!!! [I did this, too.]
+
+> She wakes up around four thirty and feels rested. Do other people feel like this all the time? It's fucked up. Her head feels all clear and she thinks for a second about pouring herself a glass of breakfast wine, but then she thinks, no this is perfect! I have four hours until I have to be at work, which means I can shave, put on makeup, then go to Kellogg's and <u>write for two and a half hours</u>. As the sun is coming up, no less.
+
+<a href="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg"><img src="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
+
+maybe I shouldn't doubt her work ethic
+
+> She has another sip and opens her notebook, <u>one of those fancy Moleskine fuckers</u> Hemingway used to write in even though Hemingway and his patriarchal, strong silent type can suck a dick.
+
+❤ ✶ Moleskine ★ ☆
+
+> She doesn't actually write or diagram or make a list or anything. She doodles.
+
+I take back what I said about work ethic
+
+> Maria was <u>this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes</u> she'd met when she'd been telling everyone [she was a] straight dude too
+
+[Underlined without comment.]
+
+> In one of <u>Michelle Tea's</u> books (maybe The Chelsea Whistle?) she writes this thing about how coffee is the greatest thing in the world, it makes your eyes bug out, it makes you want to write and produce and create and it's like speed except, something something, who can remember exact quotes. Maria's like, I'll get it tattooed on my forearm so I can remember it.
+
+who has a blurb on the back cover of this book—<u>quid pro quo</u>?
+
+> She buys a small coffee and gives the girl her driver's license to get a computer. It's weird but <u>nobody has ever once given Maria</u> shit for the gender on her license, not in the <u>five years</u> or whatever that she's been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law.
+
+that is surprising—is this detail autobiographical?
+
+> No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so if everybody, so it's not very interesting.
+
+so true
+
+> She doesn't post there as much as she used to but she still has that blog. People read it. Kids who are figuring out that they're trans look up to her. It's kind of nice although since there are so few decent resources for trans women that aren't for rich trans women or boring trans women, sometimes being the big sister is exhausting.
+
+it's even worse for gender-dysphoric males who don't buy the "trans" framing
+
+> Her name is Julia Serano and like most figureheads, she's very smart and sweet and right-on and <u>almost entirely unproblematic</u>, but her acolytes totally get obnoxious, taking her writings as doctrine.
+
+high praise
+
+> I know, Maria says. I just ... I've been thinking about trans stuff, like, all the time, and I don't feel like I can talk to anybody about it, because <u>I totally fucking hate everybody else who's trans</u>, and I don't want to deal with it.
+
+I know the feeling
+
+> But she's on the couch, in her work clothes, with a bottle of organic red wine because she knows that <u>estradiol and non-</u><span class="extra-underline">organic</span><u> red wine don't mix</u>
+
+somehow I doubt this
+
+> Maria reads so much that <u>she assumes that one day she'll have an idea and put together a Great Anti-American Novel or two</u>
+
+unfortunately, it doesn't work like that ("assume a novel")
+
+> <u>Rain rules</u>. She's all ebullient, and weirdly <u>can't wait for her lunch break so she can write in her journal again</u>.
+
+I remember those days
+
+> On top of which, <u>you dated what, three, maybe four girls before you transitioned?</u>
+
+better than me
+
+> On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out. You thought you were into it, you definitely liked the orgasms. It's not like you had any reason you knew about to be mad at your junk, but jacking off was always way easier and less stressful than actually getting and maintaining an erection when somebody else was there.
+
+yes
+
+> She gets a three-dollar drip coffee and gives the barista her license. She doesn't look at it, but she's <u>got dyke hair so she probably wouldn't care if she saw the M</u>.
+
+TERFs are a minority of dykes
+
+> She's been trying to get into it but she can't focus. It's a <u>story about a girl in New York</u> who's a knight, and she's friends with a dog, or something. <u>It's weird. She feels like you could just flip to a page and start reading. There's no plot.</u>
+
+yeah, <u>those</u> books, right
+
+[Steph is reminiscing about her relationship with Maria.]
+
+> But it turns out that <u>using your partner basically as a sex toy to get yourself off</u>—suspending disbelief and convincing yourself that she's hot for you, that she's into it—is even lonelier than never getting off.
+
+<u>usually</u> it's the trans woman in the relationship doing this—author projection??
+
+> <u>Who knows what Maria is hot for, what kind of kinks she has</u>. <u>Maria herself probably doesn't know</u>.
+
+yes, who knows??
+
+> No matter how clear Steph has been about <u>the fact that no kink could possibly be too shameful to admit</u>, even something horrifying you'd never actually want to do in real life, Maria won't fess up to anything.
+
+well, I can think of <u>one</u> ...
+
+> One time Steph observed that Maria tends not to be very performy, and <u>when she is performy, it's almost always for herself</u>, not for anyone else.
+
+★ ♡ [[I'm like this](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/#narrative-optimization), too.]
+
+[A description of James H.'s girlfriend, Nicole.]
+
+> When she was fourteen or fifteen she bought a copy of Bitch magazine at Thanks Books at the base of the mountain on the east side and it was all downhill: classic feminist awakening stuff. Dots started connecting. The righteous fury about having to wear a dress to chruch when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.
+>
+> She was the sixteen-year-old talking about Andrea Dworkin at the lunch table. Suddenly it made sense to fantasize about making out with Jason Sanger, the floppy-haired second-string kicker on the football team, and then knocking him over instead of marrying him. Basically she could see through misogynist rape culture and didn't want anything to do with it. She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn't work. She would try to think about Kathleen Hanna or Princess Leia or Scarlett Johanson when she jacked off, but no luck. At the last second they'd turn into Jason Sanger and his arms, his legs, his smirk and his tiny little butt.
+
+a novel about Nicole would be better than this one, but Imogen Binnie couldn't write it
+
+> It was a major dilemma until one day, at the lunch table, humorless feminist nonfiction tome on the table in front of her, she noticed James for the first time. Like, noticed noticed. <u>Hair to his shoulders</u>, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy, sitting at a table with Mark Richardson, probably talking about weed.
+
+check
+
+[Part 2, Chapter 5 describes James's autogynephilia.]
+
+this chapter is <u>so real</u>
+
+> <u>It's not like James is proud</u> of the pron that he looks at, but what are you supposed to do? Will yourself not to be a pervert? He's tried. He's still trying. He tries most nights.
+
+try being proud?
+
+> One blog is devoted entirely to quote unquote Scientific Transformations, so like, it will be a picture of a pretty girl in a space station with a caption that reads, Professor MacMillan stepped out of the body regenerator and his assistant smirked at the error. Or whatever. Like the premise is always nanorobots, or body switching machines, or like, who even knows? Gender-change rayguns. There are just all these pictures of women with captions explaining that they used to be men. <u>It's stupid that these are supposed to be, like, scientific</u>, because obviously science that can turn you into Pamela Anderson isn't science anyone is working on. There are archives of these things that go way back into the history of the internet but that shit is not science, it is fucking magic.
+
+<u>yes</u>
+
+> If you're a straight guy who's into the idea of being turned into a girl there's not a lot of girls who are interested in being involved in that, probably.
+
+[TODO: cry emoji]
+
+> Lots of other fetishes or whatever, like, you can frame them as cool. People can look cool getting tied up and whipped. People can look cool pissing on each other, even. Imagine if Nine Inch Nails put that in a video. You could make that cool. But wanting to be a girl? Not even like, I have known my whole life, man trapped in the body of a woman, whatever. Anyone can tell you that James is not a woman. James knows who Jennifer Finney Boylan is, and <u>he is no Jennifer Finney Boylan</u>. He's just some fuckin dude who wishes he was allowed to wear dresses.
+
+Jenny Boylan who married a woman & transitioned at 42? You might have more in common with her than you think!
+
+> This is how James knows he's an autogynephiliac instead of a transvestite. Cross-dressing seems exciting in theory but in practice it is the saddest and most disappointing thing in the world.
+
+so real
+
+> That should have been the end of his career as a transvestite, but the next night Nicole was doing something else, who knows what, so he didn't jack off all day and then he tried the dress on again at like eleven o'clock and managed to come that time, but it felt even worse than jacking off while reading stupid Internet caption porn. Like, he came, but there was barely even an orgasm, and there was no euphoria, and then he was just like, What the hell. Am I not a transvestite? Do I not like dresses? Do I have <u>a fetish that you can't even do in real life</u>, like being turned on by being eaten by slutty giants?
+
+[Underlined without comment.]
+
+> As soon as Maria Griffiths sees James Hanson in the Star City, Nevada Wal-Mart she's like, That kid is trans and <u>he</u> doesn't even know it yet.
+
+★
+
+> Because if he's being totally honest with himself, on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans and while he hasn't processed what that means yet he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her. Like not even sexual. Just like, I want to be your Facebook friend or something. I need to grab you, to have you in my life. Whatever.
+
+★
+
+> He was like, I do have the crdit card slip, maybe I could do some kind of hacker shit with it if I was a creep. And if he had the time and energy and focus to learn to do hacker shit. On some level he's been meaning to learn that stuff for a long time. So.
+
+no one does anything in this novel
+
+> The air conditioning in Steph's car isn't great, but it works. The whole car <u>feels like maybe a Platonic solid</u>
+
+I'm not sure I get this metaphor
+
+> That's the obvious reason that she flipped out and bought a bunch of drugs that to be honest she is too wimpy to even fuck around with, and then tried to disappear, and it's why she keeps charging her cell phone, <u>reading Steph and Piranha and Kieran's text</u> and thinking, yeah, tonight, I'll respond to that when I stop to eat I'll definitely let them know that I'm not dead. <u>But not doing it.</u>
+
+I was less shitty than this during my psychotic break
+
+> The central thing here is that Maria is really good at being trans.
+
pre-memoir—
-_ Nevada Annotations
+_ Book Review: Nevada
_ I'm Dropping the Pseudonym From This Blog
_ Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
_ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
_ Multi-Product Review: Various AGP Erotic Aids
_ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
_ Link: "On Transitions, Freedom of Form, [...]"
+_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality (short version?)
-------
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff
