Tags: autogynephilia, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences
Status: draft
-So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts to promulgate an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_—general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans—and, incidentally, to use these methods of systematically correct reasoning to prevent superintelligent machines from [destroying all value in the universe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile). Lately I've been calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase [due to Dale Carrico](https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html))—the pejorative is partially [ironically affectionate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness), and partially an expression of resentment and white-hot rage acquired from that time almost everyone I [used to trust](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) insisted on, on ...
+So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts to promulgate an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_—general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans—and, incidentally, to use these methods of systematically correct reasoning to prevent superintelligent machines from [destroying all value in the universe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile). Lately I've been calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase [due to Dale Carrico](https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html))—the pejorative is partially [ironically affectionate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness), and partially an expression of grief and resentment and white-hot rage acquired from that time almost everyone I [used to trust](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) insisted on, on ...
Well. That's a _long story_—for another time, perhaps. For _now_, I want to explain how my robot cult's foundational texts had an enormous influence on my self-concept in relation to sex and gender.
—are immediately provided with "Oh, that means you're not a cis boy; you're a trans girl" as the definitive explanation. But it was a different time, then. Of course I had _heard of_ transsexualism as a thing, in the form of the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, but it wasn't something I expected to actually encounter in real life.
-At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—roughly analogous to how a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
+At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender identity". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—roughly analogous to how a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
This brings me to the other thing I need to explain about my teenage years, which is that I became very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_.
So, you know, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out _The Feminine Mystique_ and Susan Faludi's _Backlash_ from the school library. Before I found my home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—_Pandagon_, _Feministe_, _Feministing_.
-(In retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from some practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends—I mean, to the extent that I had friends and not just books.)
+(In retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—my pro-feminism was an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from any practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends or whatever—I mean, to the extent that I had any friends and not just books.)
It also seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between my antisexism and the erotic and beautiful-pure-sacred self-identity things. True, the blank slate doctrine has been ideologically fashionable my entire life. In the sense that progressivism has been likened to a nontheistic state religion, I was a _very_ religious teenager. But there was presumably a _reason_ I cared so much about being a good pro-feminist, and hardly spent any time at all thinking about, _e.g._, racial justice.
-So, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ Eliezer Yudkowsky rewrote my personality over the internet.
+So, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ I fell in with this robot cult.
My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often at all, but in such a _vast_ body of work as the Sequences, it did happen to come up a few times (and those few times are the subject of this blog post).
From the perspective of axiomatic antisexism that I held at the time, this assertion is cringe-inducing. Of course most people are straight, but is it not all the _same love_?
-Thinking about it from my current perspective ... I mean, probably not? So, for the most part, all humans are extremely similar: [complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind).
+I wasn't ready to hear it then, but—I mean, probably not? So, for the _most_ part, all humans are extremely similar: as Yudkowsky would soon write about (following Leda Cosmides and John Tooby), [complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind).
* love of a man for a woman, and vice versa as separate fragments of value
* Psychological Unity of Humankind is only up to sex
* Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different
-* Faster Than Science, Transgender Edition (prior draft)
+* "The Opposite Sex" https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/
+* EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
+* Vassar slapping me down
+* "Mr. Davis"
+* I'm not actually very good at first-person visualization, which demonstrates something
+* study evidence that this is actually common
+* AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!
+
Harder—
+* Faster Than Science, Transgender Edition (prior draft)
* "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits
-* "The Opposite Sex" https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/
-* EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
* wipe culturally defined values
* finding things in the refrigerator
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
-* Vassar slapping me down
-* "Mr. Davis"
-* I'm not actually very good at first-person visualization, which demonstrates something
-* study evidence that this is actually common
My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often, but in such a vast, sprawling body of work as the Sequences, it occasionally turned out to be relevant in a discussion of evolution or human values.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff