Title: Reply to <em>The Unit of Caring</em> on Adult Human Females
Date: 2018-04-19 18:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: epistemology, sex differences, The Unit of Caring, transhumanism
+Tags: epistemology, sex differences, The Unit of Caring, terminology, transhumanism
> Thou shalt not strike terms from others' expressive vocabulary without suitable replacement.
>
> —[Alicorn](https://twitter.com/luminousalicorn/status/839542071547441152)
-_(Attention conservation notice: perhaps not that much new content relative to length if you've already read ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/).)_
-
The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog [_The Unit of Caring_ responds to](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word _woman_ as "adult human biological female":
> Oh, yeah, sorry, I've heard that one too though I've yet to find anyone willing to justify it. If you can find anyone explaining why this is a good definition, or even explaining what good properties it has, I'd appreciate it because I did sincerely put in the effort and—uncharitably, it’s as if there’s just 'matches historical use' and 'doesn’t involve any people I consider icky being in my category'.
Other authors (_e.g._, the indispensable [Anne Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/)) use "natal sex", but that has the opposite problem: "natal" (of or relating to birth) could be too generous about the extent the extent to which HRT and surgeries actually change someone's sex. (Talking about the _historical_ fact of someone's sex at birth might suggest that it's been successfully changed since.)
My proposal: "developmental sex" (in the sense of [developmental biology](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/developmental_biology), "the study of the physiological changes that occur within individual organisms from their conception through reaching physical maturity"). Trans men (respectively women, _&c._) weren't only _born_ female; their bodies went through the female developmental trajectory until they transitioned. Hopefully this alternative solves all the problems and will help us communicate more clearly!
-
Title: The Source of Our Power
Date: 2019-07-02 05:00
-Tags: discourse, my robot cult
+Tags: discourse, my robot cult, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander
Category: other
"I really don't think you're rationally considering how to maximize your contribution to rationality pedagogy and deciding it runs through freaking out about transgender and maybe abandoning the movement in disgust."
I mostly haven't been doing so well for the past ten months or so. I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has probably been a below-average year even by my standards, with hours of lost sleep, occasional crying bouts, _many, many_ hours of obsessive ruminating-while-pacing instead of doing my dayjob, and too long with a Sara Barellies song on loop to numb the pain. I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
-But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm _fucking crazy_ for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
+But this blog is not about _not_ attacking my friends. This blog is about the truth. For my own sanity, for my own emotional closure, I need to tell the story as best I can. If it's an _incredibly boring and petty_ story about me getting _unreasonably angry_ about philosophy-of-language minutiæ, well, you've been warned. If the story makes me look bad in the reader's eyes (because you think I'm crazy for getting so unreasonably angry about philosophy-of-language minutiæ), then I shall be happy to look bad for _what I actually am_. (If _telling the truth_ about what I've been obsessively preoccupied with all year makes you dislike me, then you probably _should_ dislike me. If you were to approve of me on the basis of _factually inaccurate beliefs_, then the thing of which you approve, wouldn't be _me_.)
-So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Sure, anyone will _say_ that their beliefs are true, but you can tell most people aren't being very serious about it. _We_ were going to be serious: starting with the shared canon of knowledge of cognitive biases, reflectivity, and Bayesian probability theory bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/).
+So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_. Sure, anyone will _say_ that their beliefs are true, but you can tell most people aren't being very serious about it. _We_ were going to be serious: starting with the shared canon of knowledge of cognitive biases, reflectivity, and Bayesian probability theory bequeathed to us by our founder, _we_ were going to make serious [collective](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqmjdBKa4ZaXJtNmf/raising-the-sanity-waterline) [intellectual progress](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nu3wa6npK4Ry66vFp/a-sense-that-more-is-possible) in a way that had [never been done before](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-the-skulls/).
[TODO: find a better way to summarize the core minds-as-engines that construct maps that reflect the territory]
But no one has the incentive to correct the mistake in public.
-"Some people don't have penises" ... can you be a little more specific?!
\ No newline at end of file
+"Some people don't have penises" ... can you be a little more specific?!
double-perceception of bad faith: I don't believe "categories are arbitrary" is intellectually honest (and I'm right); my interlocutors don't believe that I'm really this upset about the philosophy of language
I have 3,405 users/7,172 sessions this year, S.'s prediction lists have been 50/50 on "At least one SSC post > 100,000 hits: 50%"
+
+rhetorical superweapon: https://archive.is/6WGbk
+
+"If I'm aching at the thought of them, what for? That's not me anymore."
+
+"And I'm not the girl that I intend to be."
+
+AGP blogging: "Somebody has to and noone else will."
+
+notice the symmetry where _both_ E and I want to partition the discussion with "That's a policy question" ... I just think it's unfair to partition after "words don't have intrinsic defn's" rather than 37 ways
+
+contract-drafting em, SSC blogroll is most of my traffic
+
-Terminology Proposal: "Developmental Sex"
Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point
Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender
On the Argumentative Form "Super-proton Things Tend to Come in Varieties"