Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders [(_g_, _j_, _p_, _y_, _z_)](/images/handwritten_phrase_jazzy_puppy.jpg) because I thought it made my handwriting look more feminine. Or the time when track and field practice split up into boys and girls, and I ironically muttered under my breath, "Why did I even join this team?—boys, I mean."
[TODO: notebook photos]
-[TODO: more examples! Initials!]
+[TODO: more examples!]
And so on.
I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this whole theoretical line of argument about evolutionary psychology doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around [quasi-religious _denial_](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9).
-[TODO: bridge paragraphs ... this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex" and the metaethics sequence, men should think of themselves as men]
+[TODO: bridge paragraphs/section ... this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex" and the metaethics sequence, men should think of themselves as men; mention my initials]
Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
The main plot of my secret erotic fantasy accomodates many frame stories, but I tend to prefer those that invoke the [literary genre of science](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire), and posit technology indistinguishable from magic rather than magic _simpliciter_.
-So imagine having something like the transporter in _Star Trek_, but you re-materialize with the body of someone else, rather than your original body—a little booth I could walk in, dissolve in a tingly glowy special effect for a few seconds, and walk out looking like (say) [Nana Visitor (circa 1998)](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kay_Eaton?file=Kay_Eaton.jpg). (In the folklore of [female-transformation erotica](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), this machine is often called the ["morphic adaptation unit"](https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_115321.html).)
+So imagine having something like [the transporter in _Star Trek_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter), but you re-materialize with the body of someone else, rather than your original body—a little booth I could walk in, dissolve in a tingly glowy special effect for a few seconds, and walk out looking like (say) [Nana Visitor (circa 1998)](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kay_Eaton?file=Kay_Eaton.jpg). (In the folklore of [female-transformation erotica](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), this machine is often called the ["morphic adaptation unit"](https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_115321.html).)
This high-level description of a hypothetical fantasy technology leaves some details unspecified—not just the _how_, but the _what_. What would the indistinguishable-from-magical transformation booth do to my brain? [As a preference-revealing thought experiment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DdEKcS6JcW7ordZqQ/not-taking-over-the-world), what would I _want_ it to do, if I can't change [the basic nature of reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism), but if engineering practicalities weren't a constraint? (That is, I'm allowed to posit any atom-configuration without having to worry about how you would get all the atoms in the right place, but I'm not allowed to posit tethering my immortal soul to a new body, because [souls](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural) [aren't](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Au7kvRAPREm3ADcK/psychic-powers) [real](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies).)
Do I have _any idea_ what it would even _mean_ to fix all that, without spending multiple lifetimes studying neuroscience?
-I think I have just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would mean.
+[TODO (working): rewrite this whole section to be more focused on _just_ explaining the math language needed to explain how the transformation mapping would work, using face and height as "easy" examples]
+
+I think I have just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would mean. If sex isn't an atomic attribute, but rather a high-level statistical regularity such that people can be cleanly classified as "female" or "male" _in terms of_ lower-level traits (like hormone levels, genital shape, _&c._), then, abstractly, we're trying to take points from male distribution and map them onto the female distribution in a way that preserves as much structure as possible. My female analogue doesn't have a penis (because then she wouldn't be female), but she is going to speak American English like me and be [85% Ashkenazi like me](/images/ancestry_report.png), because language and autosomal genes don't have anything to do with sex.
+
+The subtle part as to do with traits that are meaningfully sexually dimorphic but not as a discrete dichotomy: we're _not_ satisfied with the transformation if the magical transformation technology swaps out my penis and testicles for a functioning female reproductive system but doesn't change the rest of my body.
+
+[...]
+
+I'm 5′11″ tall, which [puts me at](https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-women/) the 73rd percentile for men, about 6/10ths of a standard deviation above the mean. So _presumably_ we want to say that my female analogue is at the 73rd percentile for women, about 5′5½″.
+
+[...]
-[TODO: rewrite this whole section to be more focused on _just_ explaining the math language needed to explain how the transformation mapping would work, using face and height as "easy" examples]
People are [verifiably very good at recognizing sex from (hair covered, males clean-shaven) photographs of people's faces](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf) (96% accuracy, which is the equivalent of _d_ ≈ 3.5), but we don't have direct introspective access into what _specific_ features our brains are using to do it; we just look, and _somehow_ know. The differences are real, but it's not a matter of any single measurement: [covering up the nose makes people slower and slightly worse at sexing faces, but people don't do better than chance at guessing sex from photos of noses alone](/papers/roberts-bruce-feature_saliency_in_judging_the_sex_and_familiarity_of_faces.pdf).
[TODO: change scenario to interpolate between people, _at what point_ does it become]
-The thing about Sorites problems is that they're _incredibly boring_. The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap", but in the edge-cases where we're not sure, arguing about whether to use the word "heap" _doesn't change the configuration of sand_. You might think that if [the category is blurry](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray), you therefore have some freedom to [draw its boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) the way you prefer—but [the cognitive function of the category is for making probabilistic inferences on the basis of category-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), and those probabilistic inferences can be quantitatively better or worse. Preferences over concept definitions that aren't about maximizing predictive accuracy are preferences _for deception_.
+The thing about Sorites problems is that they're _incredibly boring_. The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap", but in the edge-cases where we're not sure, arguing about whether to use the word "heap" _doesn't change the configuration of sand_. You might think that if [the category is blurry](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray), you therefore have some freedom to [draw its boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) the way you prefer—but [the cognitive function of the category is for making probabilistic inferences on the basis of category-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), and those probabilistic inferences can be quantitatively better or worse. Preferences over concept definitions that aren't about maximizing predictive accuracy are therefore preferences _for deception_, because "making probability distributions less accurate in order to achieve some other goal" is the only thing _dece
That's why defining your personal identity to get the answer you want is cheating. If the answer you wanted was actually _true_, you could just say so without needing to _want_ it.
When [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends [said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was _more relevantly similar_ to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole strech of space time.
-Same principle when Yudkowsky wrote, "If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman [...] I don't think I'd call her 'me'"—maybe he was wrong, but if so, that cashes out as being wrong _about_ the some precise statement about the actual properties of similarity metrics on persons (which could be computed in principle, even if _we_ don't know how); I can't change the actual structure of minds in the world by defining my _identity_ differently.
+Same principle when Yudkowsky wrote, "If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman [...] I don't think I'd call her 'me'"—maybe he was wrong, but if so, that cashes out as being wrong _about_ some precise statement about the actual properties of similarity metrics on persons (which could be computed in principle, even if _we_ don't know how), _not_ whether we prefer the "call her me" or "don't call her me" conclusion and want to _define the interpretation of those phrases in order to make the claim come out "true."_
--------
+[TODO: being at peace with what's real ...]
-Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird obligate sex fantasy about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science. It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them).
+[People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
+
+-------
-Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsessions are at the center
+Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird obligate sex fantasy about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science. It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them).
+Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsession is suddenly at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights).
-I'm weird, but I'm not _that_ weird.
+All this time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation (sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like the initials) to try to seem not-masculine—I had been _assuming_ that my gender problems were not of the same kind as people who were _actually_ transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose ["internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"](https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports), and I had never interpreted my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender."
+/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/
Men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill?
learned things in the wrong order
-Anyway, I kind of spent the next ten years reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation—sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain—to try to seem not-masculine, all the while assuming that my gender problems were clearly not the same thing as the gender problems of actual trans women, because the standard narrative is that that's about gender identity being discordant from sex assigned at birth, which was clearly not what my thing was. I thought, essentially, "Gee, it's too bad this beautiful word which so perfectly describes the beautiful feeling at the center of my life happened to be coined in the context of this controversial theory about the etiology of MtF transsexualism which is probably false because everyone says it's obviously false."
+Anyway, I kind of spent the next ten years reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation—sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain—to try to seem not-masculine,
+
+
+all the while assuming that my gender problems were clearly not the same thing as the gender problems of actual trans women,
+
+because the standard narrative was that that's
+
+up through 2016 I was grappling with these issues,
+
+I'm weird, but I'm not _that_ weird.
+
+about gender identity being discordant from sex assigned at birth,
+
+which was clearly not what my thing was.
+
+I thought, essentially, "Gee, it's too bad this beautiful word which so perfectly describes the beautiful feeling at the center of my life happened to be coined in the context of this controversial theory about the etiology of MtF transsexualism which is probably false because everyone says it's obviously false."
inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar
[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
-I'm 5′11″, which [puts me at](https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-women/) the 73rd percentile for men, about 6/10ths of a standard deviation above the mean. So my female analogue at the 73rd percentile for women would be about 5′5½″.
+
[sympathetic minds gay couples anecdote]
Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_.
[TODO: the last sequence was "Craft and the Community", which has aged by far the worst—part of the robot cult's "common interest of many causes" was getting everything right, including reformulating trans ideology to be sane, which should benefit everyone because of dark-side-epistemology—but that's not realistic]
-[TODO: are we getting new recruits? A lot of the names I see are old]
\ No newline at end of file
+[TODO: are we getting new recruits? A lot of the names I see are old]
+
+
+Yudkowsky says trans rights!
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff