[TODO: transition sentence (no pun intended)]
+[TODO (somewhere): self-identity is itself a Schelling point]
+
When the _Times_ of London filed some freedom-of-information act requests, they found that [almost 90% of harrassment/assault/voyeurism incidents in changing rooms took place in the minority of unisex facilities](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/unisex-changing-rooms-put-women-in-danger-8lwbp8kgk).
[TODO: explicitly acknowledge that I'm not trying to shift goalposts; locker rooms are different from bathrooms, everyone deserves to pee]
>
> —"Reflection", _Mulan_ (as performed by Christina Aguilera)
+_(Attention conservation notice: petulant navel-gazing is boring. [Please subscribe](/feeds/all.atom.xml) for actual content later, I double-dog promise!)_
+
February has been a pretty exciting month for me in terms of advancing in my chosen profession!
First, I flew to "Munich" to participate in the all-hands team meeting for the "Blerp-d9aa89fd"[ref]As part of this blog's æsthetic tradition, we're pretending that I actually care about protecting my identity, so identifying place and proper names continue to be changed, with the replacements enclosed in "scare quotes" in their first appearance in each post, even though it's probably not hard for someone with curiosity and a search engine to work out that "Portland" is actually Berkeley, alphanumeric suffixes are the first eight bytes of the SHA256 hash of the actual name, _&c._[/ref] open-source project that I've been contributing to for the past couple years. My own contributions have been pretty modest so far: mostly plumbing that makes the error messages better, rather than the feats of computer-scientific mastery that one might naïvely expect to be necessary to contribute at all to such cutting-edge technology. This makes it all the more exciting to be accepted as part of the Team, part of the in-crowd. I'm eager to work hard to be worthy of the honor—to continue to grow and contribute more to the infrastructure [holding up the sky](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4196) of our glorious technological civilization!
---
+!!Con is doing way better than Rust on the diversity front; is that because they're doing somrething different, or because of talks vs. contribs
+-----
-!!Con is doing way better than Rust on the diversity front; is that because they're doing somrething different, or because of talks vs. contribs
+OUTLINE—
+
+ * Requiem for the Rationalists
+ * I've been involved in this subculture that's specifically about truthseeking for the past 10 years, and so in late 2016, early 2017 I kind of freaked-out, because the two-types thing seemed pretty obvious to me, and I thought that if we were going to be an epistemic community, we should get this one right, and if we can't, that's really confusing—there was actually a nervous breakdown and hopsitalization involved
+ * that may have bene slightly pre-mature; psychology is hard!
+ * lately I've been focusing on this philosophy-of-language thing, which seems _much_ more solid
+ * And ... I'm still not impressed.
+ * All the actually-smart people clearly _see_ the Bayes-structure I'm trying to point to, but they either find some excuse to dismiss it (often using the word "whatever"; I consider this blameworthy), or say that they don't want to touch the subject in public (which I don't find blameworthy if you do it explicitly)
+ * nothing is _really_ changing, but I need to stop attaching value to the rationalist brand name
+ * expecting "rationalist" social consensus to be reasonable creates a _huge_ amount of cognitive dissonance
+ * "If you speak overmuch of the way, you will not attain it."
+ * my open-source peeps are way worse
+ * martyrdom, strategy, pseudonyms
+ * I had fantasized about _suddenly_ stopping preference-falsifying on Twitter to be a Damore- or Lindsay-Shepard-like hero
+
+(The virtue of navel-gazing is that it takes less effort to just bare your soul, but this still feels like it takes enough effort to get right-enough that I might not even bother? We'll see if I summon up the energy to just bang it out in one sitting on a dedicated day: that's what "Untitled Metablogging" was, and it was a hit; and the anti-martyrdom thing is important)
And so sufficiently-widely-believed lies _bootstrap themselves into being "true."_ You might protest, "But, but, the map is not the territory! Believing doesn't make it so!" But if almost everyone accepts a narrative and _sort of_ behaves as if it were true, then that _does_ (trivially) change the _part_ of reality that consists of people's social behavior—which is the only part that _matters_ outside of someone's dreary specialist duties writing code or mixing chemicals.
-If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence rewards believers" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubbornness that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.
+If people are quantitatively less likely to do business with people who emit heresy-signals (even subtle ones, like being insufficiently enthusiastic while praising God), then believing in God really _is_ a good financial decision, which is a _successful prediction_ that legitimately supports the "Divine Providence financially rewards believers" hypothesis. With sufficient mental discipline, the occasional freethinker might be able to entertain alternative hypotheses ("Well, maybe Divine Providence isn't _really_ financially rewarding believers, and it just looks that way because of these-and-such social incentive gradients"), but given the empirical adequacy of the orthodox view, it would take a level of sheer stubborn contrarianism that isn't particularly going to correlate with being a careful thinker.
Smart people in the dominant coalition have always been _very_ good at maintaining frame control. I don't know exactly what forms this has taken historically, back when religious authorities held sway. In my secularized world which is at least nominally managed under the auspices of Reason, the preferred tactic is clever [motte-and-bailey](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) language-mindfuckery games, justified by utilitarianism: speak in a way that reinforces the coalitional narrative when interpreted naïvely, but which also permits a sophisticated-but-contrived interpretation that can never, ever be proven false, because we can [define a word any way we want](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
-Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it more expensive to perform these-and-such useful real-world [probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they ought to be [better than nothing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the perceived need to appease whichever [utility monster](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.
+Thus, trans women are women, where by 'women' I mean people who identify as women. Appeals to conceptual parsimony ("Yes, you _could_ use language that way, but that makes it more expensive to [express these-and-such useful real-world probabilistic inferences](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/)—") don't work on utilitarians who _explicitly_ reject parsimony in favor of "utility," where utility is estimated by back-of-the-envelope calculations that seem like they [ought to be better than nothing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/), but which in practice have so many degrees of freedom that the answer is almost entirely determined by the perceived need to appease whichever [utility monster](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) has made itself most politically salient to the one performing the calculation.
If you can't win the argument (because the motte is genuinely a great motte) and therefore gain status by appealing to reality, and our minds are better at tracking status than reality, then eventually dissidents either accept the narrative or destroy themselves.
-Autogynephilic males are better at coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by the patriarchy), so once a political conflict arose between AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to have a goddamned _word_ to describe themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological configuration space would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_.
+[Autogynephilic males](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) are better at coalitional politics than actual lesbians for basically the same reasons that men-in-general are better at large-scale coalitional politics than women-in-general (as evidenced by the patriarchy), so once a political conflict arose between AGPs' right to choose their "gender", and women's/lesbians' right to [have a goddamned _word_](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) to describe themselves, it was a _fait accompli_ that the group sampled from the male region in psychological configuration space would win: male psychology is [_designed_ to win costly intergroup conflicts](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3260849/). And in winning, they _create their own reality_.
-Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict (as far as I know).
+Again, probably not literally: there probably really are biochemical facts of the matter as to what traits hormone replacement therapy does and does not change, and the biochemical facts aren't going to vary depending on the outcome of a political conflict—as far as I know.
-------
+But how far is that, really? I've never _seen_ an estrogen molecule, have you? I can only _assume_ that, hypothetically, given enough time and resources and a patient teacher, I could recreate the series of observations and experiments that convinced the biochemists of our world of what they (think they) know about sex hormones.
-[but I only know that estrogen exists because I'm trusting that scientists are doing their jobs right; I've never _seen_ an estrogen molecule]
+------
successfully mindfucked affects what differences you can talk about, and what differences you can _notice_
Judiciously. As I do.
-TODO: Vassar says women are better at politics, but with narrower scope
looking for a use—
+> _There's a heart that must be free
+> To fly
+> That burns with the need to know
+> The reason why
+> Why must we all conceal
+> What we think, how we feel?
+> Must there be a secret me I'm forced to hide?_
+>
+> —"Reflection", _Mulan_ (as performed by Christina Aguilera)
> "My dear, let us hope it is not true; but, if it is true, let us hope it will not become generally known."
>
https://twitter.com/Indy_Leya/status/1095257325118648320
"Trying to Be Exp": mention how we don't have shared language to describe what orgasm feels like
+
+there's a problem where if what you actually believe is extremely nuanced, and in some contexts you say something shorter and "punchier" (that's pushing back against a local majority: see "All Debates Are Bravery Debates"), people will ever-so-slightly misinterpret the punchier version and say, "Ah-ha!" like, I'm not _intending_ to motte-and-bailey, but _something_ has to get lost between the 5000-word nuanced version and the version that fits in a Tweet, and I'm sorry that the Tweet version is bailey-like
+
+one woman's precautions against men: https://twitter.com/editingemily/status/1095853582346141697
+
+telling the only woman in a karoke group: you're our only female vocalist, you should sing this part. I wouldn't say that if there was a trans woman in the room; it's a trivial example, but life is composed of these little things
-The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned
+Social Strategy Notes
I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
-It Was a Complement!
+The Social Construction of Reality and the Sheer Goddamned
+The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artefact
+
+
Self-Identity as Focal Point; Or, Schelf-Identity
Dragon in Garage
+It Was a Complement!
Names and Genders Are Not Relevantly Analogous
Willie McCovington
A Human's Abridged Guide to Gender Words
Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
Trying to Be Explicit
-
"But It Doesn't Matter"
-
One-Way Trolls
Operationalization of Bad Faith: if people make reasoning errors that they wouldn't make with another topic having the same underlying structure
-"The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artefact": there's a problem where if what you actually believe is extremely nuanced, and in some contexts you say something shorter and "punchier" (that's pushing back against a local majority: see "All Debates Are Bravery Debates"), people will ever-so-slightly misinterpret the punchier version and say, "Ah-ha!" like, I'm not _intending_ to motte-and-bailey, but _something_ has to get lost between the 5000-word nuanced version and the version that fits in a Tweet, and I'm sorry that the Tweet version is bailey-like
+
The Charity Convergence Trap
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff