There was a brief, beautiful moment from 2014, the first year of my life (that I feel comfortable admitting to), until mid-2016—a year-and-a-half long moment when I _didn't_ have to fight a desperate and obviously hopeless [ideological war](/2020/Feb/if-in-some-smothering-dreams-you-too-could-pace/) of survival against a Society that's _trying to kill me_.
-(Technically, trying to impose the use of [gerrymandered concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) that raise the [message length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of my existence in social reality, which is the same thing as lowering the probability social reality assigns to my existence. Like I said, _trying to kill me_.)
+(Technically, trying to impose the use of [gerrymandered](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) that raise the [message length](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) of my existence in social reality, which is the same thing as lowering the probability social reality assigns to my existence. Like I said, _trying to kill me_.)
Peacetime was _amazing_. I was so happy—not ecstatic, but happy in the ordinary way of moral patient, someone whose life is valuable simply in the experience of living of it, rather than for its effects on some grand Cause. I [wrote a _chess engine_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/minimax-search-and-the-structure-of-cognition/); I [gave money to _charity_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/philanthropy-scorecard-through-2016/); I [drank _pumpkin spice_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2014/09/pumpkin-spice/) and played that tower defense game where the bad ponies are the good ponies and the good ponies are the bad ponies.
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Amy Harmon quoting Half Sigma and Jason Malloy back in the day?! Times have changed https://archive.is/6cXMD
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+Univariate fallacy again https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html
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+https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/america-has-a-boy-crisis/
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+-----
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+The problem isn't that I particularly care about citing some particular Canadian clinical psychologist; the problem is that I aspire to work in a paradigm that's _solely_ about minimizing the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions (even when it hurts, perhaps _especially_ when it hurts), which puts me in conflict with a culture that prioritizes other things, like "politeness" or "not triggering horrible dysphoria" or "not giving rhetorical ammunition to our hate-filled ideological enemies who want me and my friends to not-exist". Removing citations to the Canadian clinical psychologist wouldn't actually solve the real conflict.
+
+I mean that the joint trait distribution of males-on-exogenous-estrogen-who-have-either-been-castrated-or-are-on-spironolactone is not only not the same as the joint trait distribution of untreated natal females, it's _also_ going to be a better fit to the joint trait distribution of untreated natal males along the many dimensions that aren't sufficiently affected by exogenous hormone replacement therapy, and that this is sufficiently robust that it's useful to be able to express concisely with a short phrase such as "biological sex exists", even in cases where I don't have the expertise or data to prove it, and this is important because most of life depends on tacit knowledge embedded in linguistic and cultural priors, rather than provable expertise and data.
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+There's this cultural pattern that only went mainstream about five years ago where smart progressive people want to apply _strict scrutiny_ to any attempt to refer to or reason about sex. The culture almost never requires you to flat-out _lie_ about anything; there's just this coordinated juggernaut of gerrymandered concepts and unparsimonious implied causal theories and isolated demands for rigor that I think are _in practice_ making everyone crazy, even if you can never catch anyone in an easily verifiable lie.
+
+Ordinary people can _in fact_ recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy (hair covered, males clean-shaven) even though we don't have introspective access to _how_ our brains are accomplishing this high-dimensional image-classification task: <http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf>, and this is actually important for understanding what's actually going on in the heads of TERFs who cry, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that's a man! How dumb do you think we are?! Fraud!! Gaslighting!!1!"
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+If the normative high-status response in your culture is to say, "How do you know? What do you mean by _man_? I think this is just dumb gatekeeping, and you're a horrible person who deserves contempt", then I think your culture ends up very confused about human behavior, because minimizing the length of the message needed to desribe your observations (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length>) would require concepts to which the culture has assigned long codeword lengths ("assigned at birth"). But I can't prove it.
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+(I borrowed the "dumb gatekeeping" and "horrible people who deserve contempt" language from Brodski's blog post <https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/>)
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+I'm _not happy_ about the fact that this belief puts me in conflict with everyone in Berkeley and _especially_ the people who are _exactly like me_ except born five years later but I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do?
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff