Title: Comp
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-18 05:00
Category: other
Tags: whimsical
-Status: draft
_(-romise, -ensation)_
Title: "I Want to Be the One"
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-14 05:00
Category: other
Tags: music, my robot cult
-Status: draft
_This life is not to last and it awaits apotheosis
And the passerby all sipping on their Monday coffee know this
Title: More Schelling
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-22 05:00
Category: other
Tags: categorization, game theory
-Status: draft
[(Previously.)](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/)
This explains why the trans-rights fight ends up focusing on language, rather than any particular policy where "gender" is used to make a decision. "What's the harm in calling people what they really want to be called?" goes the argument. "You can still say _cis woman_ when you want to be more specific."
-It doesn't work like that. When you [change the category associated with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) a [short codeword](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes), you're imposing on all the downstream predictions and decisions people were already using that category/word for—nor have people catalogued all those decisions in advance; they just expect to be able to think using [top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns) (coordination signals) that came with their native tongue, much as how they expect to be able to think using clock time without needing to compute Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars.
\ No newline at end of file
+It doesn't work like that. When you [change the category associated with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) a [short codeword](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes), you're imposing on all the downstream predictions and decisions people were _already_ using that category/word for—nor have people catalogued all those decisions in advance; they just expect to be able to think using [top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns) (coordination signals) that came with their native tongue, much as how they expect to be able to think using clock time without needing to compute Earth's rate of rotation relative to the fixed stars. The skew between daylight-savings time and sidereal time would have to get pretty extreme before people started changing their schedules—or, if that were somehow forbidden, to deny the clock's authority and just start using the sun.
Title: On the Argumentative Form "Super-Proton Things Tend to Come In Varieties"
-Date: 2019-07-03 05:00
+Date: 2019-12-12 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: categorization, epistemology, Eliezer Yudkowsky
-Status: draft
> "[...] Between one and the infinite in cases such as these, there are no sensible numbers. Not only two, but any finite number, is ridiculous and can't exist."
>
At this point, some readers might be thinking, "Wait a minute, M. Taylor! Didn't you notice that part about 'There's an allegation that people are reluctant to speciate more than one kind of gender dysphoria'? That's [_your_ hobbyhorse](/tag/two-type-taxonomy/)! Even if Yudkowsky doesn't know you exist, by publicly offering a _general_ argument that there are multiple types of dysphoria, he's _effectively_ doing your cause a favor—and here you are _criticizing_ him for it! Isn't that disloyal and ungrateful of you?"
-Great question! And the answer is: **no, absolutely not**. (And, though I can never speak for anyone but myself, I can only _imagine_ that Yudkowsky would agree? Everything I do, I [learned from him](https://www.readthesequences.com/).) And the _reason_ it's not disloyal and ungrateful is because the entire mindset in which arguments _can_ constitute a political favor is a _confusion_. The map is not the territory; what's true is already so. [You can't](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument) make something _become true_ by arguing for it; [you can only use arguments to figure out what's true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument).
+Great question! And the answer is: **no, absolutely not**. (And, though I can never speak for anyone but myself, I can only _imagine_ that Yudkowsky would agree? Everything I do, I [learned from him](https://www.readthesequences.com/).) And the _reason_ it's not disloyal and ungrateful is because the entire mindset in which arguments _can_ constitute a political favor is a _confusion_. The map is not the territory; what's true is already so. You [can't](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) make something _become true_ by arguing for it; you can only [use arguments to figure out what's true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument).
-The fact that not everyone understands this makes it especially important for me to loudly and publicly dispute [bad arguments whose conclusion I think is true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) for _other reasons_. I don't _want_ to trick people into accepting my [bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) for fake reasons! What I want is for us all to [get better at anticipating our experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences). Together.
+The fact that [not everybody knows this](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) makes it especially important for me to loudly and publicly dispute [bad arguments whose conclusion I think is true](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) for _other reasons_. I don't _want_ to trick people into accepting my [bottom line](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34XxbRFe54FycoCDw/the-bottom-line) for fake reasons! What I want is for us all to [get better at anticipating our experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences). Together.
Title: Political Science Epigrams
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-11 23:30
Category: other
Tags: cathartic, game theory
-Status: draft
If your policy is, "We don't negotiate with terrorists, but we do appease bears", then from the perspective of a third party fighting a war against the bears, you look like a productive asset being farmed by the bears, and thus, a legitimate military target.
Title: Promises I Can Keep
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-16 05:00
Category: other
Tags: romance
-Status: draft
"I think if you show any indications of being an egg, you _need_ to marry someone who's OK with you eventually transitioning. Not because you necessarily _will_ want to transition, but because it's likely enough that you need to plan for it."
Title: Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-20 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: categorization, epistemology, Ozy, sociology
-Status: draft
> With the Hopes that our World is built on
> They were utterly out of touch,
>
> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
-At the end of [their reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.[ref]As teased at the beginning of [the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list), I _also_ have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in ["Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/). The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a [ludicrously, _miserably_ unproductive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the October 2019 (!) date of this one.)[/ref] What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
+At the end of [their reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.[ref]As teased at the beginning of [the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list), I _also_ have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in ["Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/). The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a [ludicrously, _miserably_ unproductive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the December 2019 (!) date of this one.)[/ref] What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.[ref]_E.g._, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.[/ref]
Title: The Strategy of Stigmatization
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-12-12 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, game theory, stigma
-Status: draft
One common reaction by the Blanchpilled to autogynephilia-truther sites—I mean, the shouty sensationalist kind run by [conservatives](https://archive.is/PsTQP) or [radical](https://outofmypantiesnow.wordpress.com/) [feminists](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/) that almost never use phrases like "uselessly low-dimensional subspace", not _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_—goes like this:
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff