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-> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
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-> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
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-At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
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-A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
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-(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
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In Berkeley, I met a number of really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
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So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
I realize it wasn't personal—no one _consciously_ thinking "I'm going to trick autogynpehilic men into cutting their dicks off", but
-the most recent pronoun update
-https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228
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-> I would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character.
-[...]
-> I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than "doesn't look like an Oliver" is attached to something in your head.
like the time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
I'm writing to you because I'm afraid that marketing is a more powerful force than argument. Rather than good arguments propogating through the population of so-called "rationalists" no matter where they arise, what actually happens is that people like Eliezer and you rise to power on the strength of good arguments and entertaining writing (but mostly the latter), and then everyone else sort-of absorbs most of their worldview (plus noise and [conformity with the local environment](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/)). So for people who _didn't_ [win the talent lottery](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) but think they see a flaw in the _Zeitgeist_, the winning move is "persuade Scott Alexander".
-https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-16
-> 16: I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female.
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https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159611207744228?comment_id=10159611208509228&reply_comment_id=10159613820954228
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> In the circles I run in, being poly isn't very political, just a sexual orientation like any other—it's normalized the way that LGBT is normalized in saner circles, not political the way that LGBT is political in crazier circles.
https://archive.is/7Wolo
Sure: everyone in a conflict thinks they're acting defensively against aggressors infringing on their rights, because in the cases where everyone agrees what the "actual" property rights are, there's no conflict.
-typographic attack: https://openai.com/blog/multimodal-neurons/
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https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
> These neurons detect gender^10
> Footnote: By this, we mean both that it responds to people presenting as this gender, as well as that it responds to concepts associated with that gender.
> Still think this was a perfectly fine tweet btw. Some people afaict were doing the literal ontologically confused thing; seemed like a simple thing to make progress on. Some people wanted to read it as a coded statement despite all my attempts to narrow it, but what can you do.
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1356535300986523648
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If you were actually HONESTLY tring to narrow it, you would have said, "By the way, this is just about pronouns, I'm not taking a position on whether trans women are women"
https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjectives/order-of-adjectives/
the second generation doesn't "get the joke"; young people don't understand physical strength differences anymore
-voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, or for words with two letters rather than three.
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative#Voiceless_palato-alveolar_fricative
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-https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
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I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
[TODO: reorganize to position the question first]
-[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
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-I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
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-[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_.
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-Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
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[TODO: lit search or ask linguistics.stackexchange for literature on what gender/plural/case/&c. distinctions are for? Is it just the collision/ambiuity reduction, or is there something else? Oh, or Anna T./Elena might know]
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14
> Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.
+There's a glowfic thread where Thellim is _horrified_ at how shallow and superficial Jane Austen characters are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be: "Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves."
+
+This horror is basically how I feel about trans culture. It actively discourages self-modeling! (People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Politically-unfavorable critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._)
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=20
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+_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._
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+https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=21
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Really, it's impressive how far we got in establishing a cult of Bayesians in a world where "discimination" is a transgression against the dominant ideology! I can't be the only one who got the joke
https://stefanfschubert.com/blog/2020/12/22/legitimate-epistocracy
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff