The change in other agents' behaviors elicited by [sending the signals](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution) of a different type is so dramatic specifically [_because_ it's a rare, off-equilibrium play](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist): if there were much more probability-mass just on either side of a line people are using to make predictions and decisions, then _the line wouldn't be there_.
If we truly want to bring an end to gender-based oppression, it seems like such an ambitious social engineering project would be _helped_ by understanding elementary points like this? The most _useful_ thing that any of us can do is to to start having our beliefs about gender reflect the [laws of inductive inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) as applied to the special case of other people's behaviors and bodies. Not to disagree with the expedition to [a land where the children are free](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/), but for the fear that between here and there, there are so many boundaries. Far more than I know.
+
+[TODO: edit the ending to not be so desperate to riff off Serano or Tangled or wave my usual "Truth!!" flag, but just be really clear about the statistical point I'm making]
https://twitter.com/epkaufm/status/1325170892582744065
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/georgias-runoffs-will-determine-control-of-the-senate-heres-what-we-know-so-far/
+
+another recursive distortion conditional on fraud: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1330705494990856195
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_.
-[TODO: need to introduce the pefect and obvious word "autogynephilia" and link to "Beacon Through the Darkness", probably around here, and the two-types]
+[TODO: need to introduce the obvious and perfect word "autogynephilia" and link to "Beacon Through the Darkness", probably around here, and the two-types]
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_.
But I have to try. A clue: when I'm ... uh. When I'm—well, you know ...
-(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this. This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)—)
+(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this. This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)—)
A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to live like that.
But it might not be obvious to _everyone_. The detailed exposition above about what it would even mean to change sex is the result of a _lot_ of thinking influenced by everything I've read and learned—and in particular, the reductionist methodology I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the specific warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its mailing-list predecessor) that this is a _hard problem_.
-We can imagine that a male who was _like_ me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who [read different books in a different order](TODO: link "The Feeling Is Mutual"), might come to very different conclusions about himself.
+We can imagine that a male who was _like_ me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who [read different books in a different order](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/), might come to very different conclusions about himself.
If you don't have the conceptual vocabulary to say, "I have a lot of these beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings about being female, but it seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must be some sort of causal relationship between that and this erotic fantasy, which is realistically going to be a variation in _male_ sexuality," you might end up saying something simpler like, "I want to be a woman." Or possibly even, "I _am_ a woman, on the inside, where it counts."
So where does that leave me? This post is about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I've _mentioned_ transgenderedness several times in the main body of this post, but I've tried to mostly limit the intent of it to references to an explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits, or the brief summary of the two-type Blanchard taxonomy for which the word _autogynephilia_ (the obvious and perfect word for my thing) was coined. Everything I've said so far is _consistent_ with a world in which Blanchard was dumb and wrong, a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I _thought_ I lived in for the ten years after encountering the obvious and perfect word.
+[TODO: Yudkowsky on "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"?!]
+[TODO: Caldecott tunnel joke]
+
But after moving to Berkeley and doing a little bit more reading ... I _don't_ think Blanchard was dumb and wrong. I think the two-type taxonomy is _basically_ correct, as a first approximation. (Where psychology is complicated enough such that there's much more to be said about what that means, and what better approximations would look like, but simple theories that [explain a lot of our observations](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) are better than pretending not to have a theory.) I think a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_.
So, I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I _possibly_ have the _astounding_ arrogance to reply, "No, actually I think you're just a perverted male like me"?
[TODO: Nevada. Nevada specifically dissess the Blanchard account, as do people I talk to. One said AGP transition could be possible but very rare, and the same goddamned person is on the record as being into TF porn at 19 when their dysphoria kicked in; or someone dissed Blanchard, but endorses Anne Vitale, which makes the same observations and arrives at the same taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language]
+[TODO: Twitter anecdotes?]
[TODO: Dr. Will Powers backlink]
[...]
Reality has a single level (physics), but our models of reality have multiple levels. To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As it is written: the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.) [TODO: reductionism links]
-Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (for predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses. (The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.)
+Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (as predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses. (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 engineering bridges are good) would be described by a 70-node causal graph, but it turns out that some of the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other, 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 like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
[TODO: But I do have enough evidence to know that the prevailing narrative _doesn't add up_. Serano's proposal makes no predictions.]
+Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want. Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want.
+
+So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and )
-The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
\ No newline at end of file
+Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition
Title: Survey Data on Cis and Trans Women Among Haskell Programmers
Date: 2021-01-01
Category: other
-Tags: Haskell, sex differences
+Tags: Haskell, sex differences, Python
Status: draft
Stereotypically, computer programming is both a predominantly male profession and the quintessential profession of non-exclusively-androphilic trans women. Stereotypically, these demographic trends are even more pronounced in "niche", academic, or hobbyist technology communities (_e.g._, Rust), rather than those with more established mainstream use (_e.g._, JavaScript).
But stereotypes can be _wrong_! The heuristic process by which people's brains form stereotypes from experience are riddled with biases that prevent our mental model of what people are like from matching what people are _actually_ like. Unless you believe [a woman is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller (which is _mathematically impossible_)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_fallacy), you're best off seeking _hard numbers_ about what people are like rather than relying on mere stereotypes.
-Fortunately, sometimes hard numbers are available! Taylor Fausak has been administering an annual State of Haskell survey [since 2017](https://taylor.fausak.me/2017/11/15/2017-state-of-haskell-survey-results/), and the [2018](https://taylor.fausak.me/2018/11/18/2018-state-of-haskell-survey-results/), [2019](https://taylor.fausak.me/2019/11/16/haskell-survey-results/), and [2020](TODO: linky) surveys include optional "What is your gender?" and "Do you identify as transgender?" questions, as well as the anonymous response data.
+Fortunately, sometimes hard numbers are available! Taylor Fausak has been administering an annual State of Haskell survey [since 2017](https://taylor.fausak.me/2017/11/15/2017-state-of-haskell-survey-results/), and the [2018](https://taylor.fausak.me/2018/11/18/2018-state-of-haskell-survey-results/), [2019](https://taylor.fausak.me/2019/11/16/haskell-survey-results/), and [2020](https://taylor.fausak.me/2020/11/22/haskell-survey-results/) surveys include optional "What is your gender?" and "Do you identify as transgender?" questions, as well as the anonymous response data.
I wrote a script to use these answers from the CSV response data for the 2018–2020 surveys to tally the number of cis and trans women among survey respondents. (In Python. Sorry.)
survey_results_filenames = [
"2018-11-18-2018-state-of-haskell-survey-results.csv",
"2019-11-16-state-of-haskell-survey-results.csv",
- # TODO: 2020
+ "2020-11-22-haskell-survey-results.csv",
]
if __name__ == "__main__":
for results_filename in survey_results_filenames:
- year, _ = results_filename.split('-', 1)
+ year, _ = results_filename.split("-", 1)
with open(results_filename) as results_file:
reader = csv.DictReader(results_file)
total = 0
trans_f = 0
for row in reader:
total += 1
- if row['What is your gender?'] == "Female":
- transwer = row['Do you identify as transgender?']
+ # 2018 and 2019 CSV header has the full question, but
+ # 2020 uses sXqY format
+ gender_answer = (
+ row.get("What is your gender?") or row.get("s7q2")
+ )
+ if gender_answer == "Female":
+ transwer = (
+ row.get("Do you identify as transgender?") or
+ row.get("s7q3")
+ )
if transwer == "No":
cis_f += 1
elif transwer == "Yes":
trans_f += 1
print(
- "{}: total: {}, cis-♀: {}, trans-♀: {}".format(
- year, total, cis_f, trans_f
+ "{}: total: {}, "
+ "cis-♀: {} ({:.2f}%), trans-♀: {} ({:.2f}%)".format(
+ year, total,
+ cis_f, 100*cis_f/total,
+ trans_f, 100*trans_f/total,
)
)
It prints this tally:
```
-2018: total: 1361, cis-♀: 26, trans-♀: 19
-2019: total: 1211, cis-♀: 16, trans-♀: 16
+2018: total: 1361, cis-♀: 26 (1.91%), trans-♀: 19 (1.40%)
+2019: total: 1211, cis-♀: 16 (1.32%), trans-♀: 16 (1.32%)
+2020: total: 1348, cis-♀: 12 (0.89%), trans-♀: 21 (1.56%)
```
-[TODO: 2020 data; I briefly thought about pooling years to get a better sample size, but that's methodologically invalid because probably a lot of the same people took the survey multiple years]
+[TODO: wrap up]
Planned Parenthood on "How to Know If Your Kid Is Transgender": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJdafLVf6xo
Trans Kids: It's Time to Talk film: https://archive.org/details/TransKidsItsTimeToTalk
+
+HBO documentary Transhood
(Silent influence!) "(to crib an expression) she sounds less like a person than she does like an AI trying to maximize the number of gay and trans people" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8l0kdk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_21_2018/dzloeuv/
-(Silent influence!) "it's quite possible the people claiming this harm have actually psyched themselves up to actually be emotionally harmed (I think there's an SSC article on this phenomenon)" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8ryoo8/culture_war_roundup_for_june_18/e11m79c/ (The concept isn't original to "Terrorist Memeplexes", but I don't think this is Scott's line, and I think it's more likely that the commenter got it from me than Devin Helton)
+(Silent influence maybe?) "it's quite possible the people claiming this harm have actually psyched themselves up to actually be emotionally harmed (I think there's an SSC article on this phenomenon)" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8ryoo8/culture_war_roundup_for_june_18/e11m79c/ (The concept isn't original to "Terrorist Memeplexes", but I don't think this is Scott's line, and I think it's more likely that the commenter got it from me than Devin Helton)
(Silent influence!) "Don't negotiate with terrorist memeplexes, just cave in to their demands!" https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/akk8nc/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_28/efhz21i/
Lex talking about me—
> he chatted with me on facebook abt it before his psychotic break but he was kinda bad at communication before that and had a trust in The Literature i found to be fundametally-epistemically-flawed
> but then he had a psychotic break about how he is Being Lied To????? and now he is So Good at communication
+
+Someone's livestream had a big segment of him just reading my Murray review?! Weird https://altcensored.com/watch?v=GHZ53bx4Ayc
-- Crossing the Line
+- Survey Data on Cis and Trans Women in Haskell
_ Dr. Will Powers on Autogynephilia
-- Survey Data on Cis and Trans Women in Haskell (waiting for 2020 data)
-
+- Crossing the Line
- Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
+
Iffy—
- Amy Wax linkpost
- The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
-
-
_ Novemember 2020 Political Notes; Or, Sen. Kelly Loeffler Is Mostly Living in a Simulation Now
Main path (important posts)—
> The realization blasted through Harry like a vast dam breaking, releasing out all its water, bursting through his mind in an irresistible flood that swept everything away.
> There is only one reality that generates all of the observations.
-(http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/104)
\ No newline at end of file
+(http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/104)
+
+It's not a gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as a gender identity
+
+The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
\ No newline at end of file
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff