"I Tell Myself" Sunday drafting session 4: "kind of obvious, really"

diff --git a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt b/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
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--- a/notes/i-tell-myself-notes.txt
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@@ -72,9 +72,9 @@ The sheer number of hours we invested in this operation is _nuts_: desperate all
 
 what about _my_ mental health?
 
-Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women? We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?
 
-my friend thinks I'm naive to have expected such a community—she was recommending "What You Can't Say" in 2009—but in 2009, we did not expect that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue, which is new evidence about the wisdom of the original vision
+Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill
+
 
 but if my expectations (about the community) were wrong, that's a problem with my model; reality doesn't have to care
 
@@ -472,8 +472,6 @@ fame: arguing with a Discord server was low-impact compared to getting the leade
 
 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEGnJBHmkcwPTysb7/lonely-dissent
 
-Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill
-
 
 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/does-age-bring-wisdom/
 
@@ -488,13 +486,6 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2
 
 
 
-The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
-
-At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at the idea in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back eleven years later (my deconversion from my teenage religion being pretty thorough at this point, I think), the _argument makes sense_ (though you need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI doesn't give every _individual_ their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other).
-
-On my reading of the text, it is _significant_ that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the _verthandi_, rather than just being referred to as women. The _verthandi_ may _look like_ women, they may be _approximately_ psychologically human, but the _detailed_ psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, and judicious exercise of the [tenth virtue of precision](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) demands that a _different word_ be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person.
-
-
 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions
 
 > Jun 18, 2008

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@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
+
+At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at the idea in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back eleven years later (my deconversion from my teenage religion being pretty thorough at this point, I think), the _argument makes sense_ (though you need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI doesn't give every _individual_ their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other).
+
+On my reading of the text, it is _significant_ that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the _verthandi_, rather than just being referred to as women. The _verthandi_ may _look like_ women, they may be _approximately_ psychologically human, but the _detailed_ psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, and judicious exercise of the [tenth virtue of precision](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) demands that a _different word_ be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person. Calling the _verthandi_ "women" would be _worse writing_; it would _fail to communicate_ what, in the story, has been lost.
+
+-----
+
+Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?
+
+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.
+
+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? "The trait distribution of trans women isn't identical to that of cis women" does not _convey the same meaning_.
+
+----