Tuesday morning

diff --git a/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md b/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md
index 4489816..49bac83 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md
+++ b/content/drafts/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md
@@ -205,7 +205,7 @@ And of course—it _should_ be needless to say—this applies symmetrically. If
 
 Or if you have more important things to worry about and don't want to take a position on controversial social issues, fine: use whatever pronoun convention happens to be dominant in your local social environment, and, if questioned, say, "I'm using the pronoun convention that happens to be dominant in my local social environment." You don't have to invent _absurd lies_ to make it look like the convention that happens to be dominant in your local social environment has no costs.
 
-Really, "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'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could tell you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English, you _goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did the elephant in your brain really expect to get away with that? How dumb do you think we are?!
+Really, "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'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could tell you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English, you _goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!
 
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@@ -215,6 +215,13 @@ Really, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun
 
 I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. Let me explain.
 
+As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). The question of _how_ trans people know who they are is usually left unspecified.
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diff --git a/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md b/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md
index 56d0b09..3b85839 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md
+++ b/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md
@@ -6,7 +6,11 @@ Status: draft
 
 [This started out as a draft email to Scott, but I'm really unhappy with the way it's developing; I should try to sculpt it into a defensible public post instead—or make it a good email first, then a post]
 
-parsimony intuitions and autogenderphilia
+parsimony intuitions, autogenderphilia
+
+> Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
+>
+> —[Steven Kaas](https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656)
 
 Explaining my view in a way that I think you'll understand turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a [Science _vs._ Bayescraft](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viPPjojmChxLGPE2v/the-dilemma-science-or-bayes) thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, frankly, I also expect my parsiony intuitions to actually get the right answer in the real world, and modesty/[Outside View](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FsfnDfADftGDYeG4c/outside-view-as-conversation-halter)/[Caution on Bias Arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/) to get the wrong answer. So, self-consciousness aside, here goes—
 
@@ -64,7 +68,7 @@ If you're wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population
 
 This is why I expect the standard "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" cope to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither yours nor [Moser 2009](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf)'s); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl.
 
-The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable, is because my skepticism is _specifically_ about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the extra work to try to figure out whether the 1–5 question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a _higher-bandwidth_ channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response.
+The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable, is because my skepticism is _specifically_ about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the _extra work_ to try to figure out whether the 1–5 question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a _higher-bandwidth_ channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response.
 
 You _start_ to get into these issues with the "My literal body is arousing" account in the post, but I expect more digging to reveal a different picture. Of course, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in [TODO: unredact name1]'s head. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to [TODO: name2] in 2016, her _first_ reaction was, "I can relate to this; I'm turned on by the idea of being a hot girl", but then when I went into _a little more detail_ (linking to the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) TVTropes page), she revised to, "Wait, no, I can't relate this at all; like, you _want_ to have breasts?" (I regret that this is paraphrased from memory; I haven't been able to find the transcript because I think Sarah deleted her Facebook account a couple times.)
 
@@ -72,7 +76,7 @@ My common-sense intuition is that the experience of being happy and proud with o
 
 Fundamentally, I just have _so much_ trouble _actually_ believing that [name1]'s experience of her body is more relevantly similar to mine than [name2]'s, _even if_ [name1] ends up sometimes using similar English words as me (_e.g._, "it's hot that I have breasts"). I can conceive of being wrong about this, but I don't think the _SSC_ survey data is a powerful enough instrument to make that call—I'd want in-depth interviews and preferably the kind of physical arousal measurements that Michael Bailey's lab does.
 
-In a world where it was _actually true_ where "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]" reflected the causal structure of what was actually going on in the world, I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking, to _look like_ the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts—and that's not what I see.
+In a world where it was _actually true_ where "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]" reflected what was actually going on in the world, I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking, to _look like_ the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts—and when I empirically-but-unscientifically eyeball the world (which is a much _higher-bandwidth_ information channel than eyeballing the shape of the 1–5 survey response histogram), that's not what I see. I could be biased, but—well, do _you_ see it? Where?
 
 Here's [an example from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
 
@@ -84,25 +88,15 @@ I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women _and_ non-tra
 
 I think the boring hypothesis here is "Yes, of course, because trans women are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians." Again, this isn't Science, because I'm just using my brain's pattern-matching capabilities (I could be selectively remembering, distorting my categories, _&c._). With time and funding, I'm sure it would be possible to make it more formal—gather Reddit comments from cis and trans women, have raters categorize themes while blinded to the cis/trans identity of the authors ...
 
-But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd manages come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal explanations that can't _possibly_ match up with the machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out, then I'm not sure how to proceed. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
-
-Ozy has an old post about [how "the community" doesn't have a _gender_ gap; we merely have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/). In my worldview, this should be _embarrassing_. (If you keep running into domains where "assigned" sex is a more useful predictor than "gender", that should be a clue that sex is real and gender identity is fake.) But if Ozy's mind hasn't been [created already in motion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CuSTqHgeK4CMpWYTe/created-already-in-motion) to find it embarrassing even after it's been pointed out, then I'm not sure what else I can say?
-
-And yet—if it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you 
-
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-
+But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! People _agree_ that AGP is common in lesbian trans women (after this is pointed out with sufficient force, if it looks like the general public isn't looking). You _agree_ that it looks like there are two types of MtF differentiated by sexual orientation; you just think that the second type is an intersex condition because ... ???
 
+From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd basically _agree_ with me on all the empirical observables, but then _somehow_ you people manage come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal "explanations" that can't _possibly_ match up with the underlying cognitive machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out, then I'm not sure how to proceed. I can't _prove_ that all these gynephilic physiological males with male-typical interests are men with a fetish rather than women in male bodies, for the same reason I can't prove there's not an [invisible inaudiable dragon that's permeable to flour](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief) in your garage. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
 
+Ozy has an old post about [how "the community" doesn't have a _gender_ gap; we merely have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/). In my worldview, this should be _embarrassing_. (If you keep running into domains where "assigned" sex is a more useful predictor than "gender", that should be a clue that sex is real and gender identity is fake.) But if Ozy's mind hasn't been [created already in motion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CuSTqHgeK4CMpWYTe/created-already-in-motion) to find it embarrassing even after it's been pointed out, then I'm not sure what else I can say?
 
+If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty.
 
-
-
-
-I would totally respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality; I can't expect everyone to share my parsimony intuitions.
-
-But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!
-
+I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) (And if I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain agnostic about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an empty garage.) But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other.
 
 [TODO: behavioral genetics and trans]
 

diff --git a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
index ad927e6..dca8cb8 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
+++ b/notes/a-hill-of-validity-sections.md
@@ -428,4 +428,6 @@ back in 'aught-nine, Anna commented that no one in our circle was that old, as i
 
 Dawkins and Dennett have joined the intellectual gender-ID skeptics; shame that Yudkowsky can't reach that level
 
-• at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam  
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+• at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
+
+Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinions—you should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender