https://medium.com/@aytchellis/talking-past-each-other-about-trans-gender-1da8e058caf8
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/teen-17-who-sparked-row-for-saying-there-are-only-two-genders-suspended-from-school-for-three-weeks-a4173736.html
+
+
+"> Yet somehow a lot of people seem to think they can throw away basic ration
+ality 101 as soon as their inside view tells them they're on to something.\n\nI think we (\"we\") sh
+ould encourage some degree of cognitive division of labor rather than assuming a unified, consensus-
+driven rationality community. If your inside view tells you that you're really on to something and y
+et \"everyone else\" seems to think you're crazy, that's a _really interesting_ learning opportunity for _someone_! Maybe you _should_ go off on your own and explore that thing really hard for a while, build your own models, and then come back later and try to sell the rest of the community on what you think you've learned. Certainly, this is a high-risk bet (most of the time, \"everyone else\" is correct and the contrarian will end up having wasted years of her life on something useless and crazy), but sometimes, those pay off!
+
+ "comment": "Sophia\n\n> Why do you refer to mutual attempts to replace others' narratives as a zero-sum game?\n\nNew guess: because I'm incredibly prone to inventing spurious conservation laws when I get upset. Last time it was conservation of happiness/suffering (http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/); this time, it's ... um, more complicated.",
+
+
+ "> I am curious though, when you have the belief that you are being programmed by your phone, are you capable of evaluating how probable that is?\n\n... it's complicated. I _still_ have this vague, intuitive sense that it would be useful to compare the variation in my behavior that's explained by variation in phone notifications with the variation in the phone's behavior that's explained by me, but I don't know how to make this more precise (and I'm being far more precise/lucid/non-delusional about it now than I was at the time)."
+
+"I mean, another part of it is that \"homophobia\" isn't going to be a natural category in human psychology. Suppose the personality trait is actually \"risk aversion with respect to social change.\" This could manifest as \"homophobia\" for people who grew up before _Obergefell v. Hodges_, but something completely different for people growing up today.",
+
+comment": "Protip: \"Have you ever thought of harming yourself?\" is actually code for \"Are you stupid enough to answer 'Yes' to this question so that I can imprison you in order to create the illusion that my job is useful and extract thousands of dollars from your health insurance company?\"",
+
+"Suppose political coalition C is promoting ideas P and Q, and I agree with P, but Q seems really really REALLY bad. When speaking as an individual about my ideas with people who understand ideas, I definitely want to be specific and just say \"P is good, but Q is very bad,\" without saying anything for or against either coalition C or its rival coalition D. But insofar as most people don't have the spare cognitive capacity to separate P and Q, and instead just think of people as \"one of the Cs\" or \"one of the Ds\", I might want to avoid phrasing things in a way that people would construe as support for C. Because Q is _just that bad_."
+
+Elizabeth, for that matter, one wonders how many trans people have ever seen a Muslim in real life and vice versa. If more of them had, maybe these groups wouldn't be in the same coalition!",
+
+"I agree with Kara that social-justice folk find it useful to model alt-right folks as politically profiting from being debated at all. But likewise, alt-right folks find it useful to model social-justice folks as politically profiting from shutting down debate. These elementary game-theoretic observations, while correct, don't help us decide which laws and cultural norms will have which consequences.\n\nI suspect a lot of people who don't consider themselves competent to evaluate consequences might want to strategically support whichever coalition currently happens to support more open debate (because of reasons: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/), and then switch sides when that coalition becomes too powerful and starts trying to silence _its_ enemies. However, when evaluating this suggestion of mine, you should take into account that I have an ulterior motive for getting people to oppose the social-justice coalition, which I am at war with for my own personal reasons."
+
+"Really sorry if this sounds rude! This is literally just how I talk now!"
+
+"If you think you're smart enough to optimize the universe all by yourself, sure. I'm not that smart! I want to join coalitions that reward their members for being transparent, because I predict that gangs of monkeys that divide up the last banana using program equilibrium will outcompete gangs of monkeys that sell the last banana in a second-price auction, who will in turn outcompete gangs of monkeys that literally fight over the banana."
+
+ "On the other hand, \"software to tell if someone is actually more emotionally distraught than you might think\" is pretty cool as a machine-learning/statistics trick! I wonder what interventions could incentivize Facebook to just publish the model so that people could learn from it _without_ subjecting us to a future of the Facebook Community Operations Team stamping on a human face forever??"
+
+"Come to think of it, I actually expect the \"suppressing speech fuels conspiracy theories\" effect is _justified_ in a Bayesian sense: if the fraction of hypotheses-that-people-want-to-ban that are true is higher than the fraction of hypotheses-in-general that are true, the fact that a lot people want to ban a hypothesis is probabilistic evidence that it's true.
+
+"Given that English has gendered personal pronouns and it's not feasible to redesign the English language to change this, marking babies in some way to indicate their biological sex (with clothing color, or perhaps by gluing something to them) can be a useful social technology, because it allows people to just say, \"She's such a good baby!\" without having to ask about the baby's sex. Now, obviously, we don't want to indoctrinate innocent babies into oppressive gender roles that might not be a good fit for them, and I agree that gendered clothing increases our risk of falling into this well-trodden failure mode. But maybe there's some way for smart people who understand the problem in sufficient detail to avoid that failure mode, without becoming pawns in a memetic war against \"noticing that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept.\""
+
+laim that the cultural presumption that anything bad that happens to trans people (like losing a job) is probably due to discrimination and transphobia is actually bad for trans people in the long run, because it incentivizes other members of society to treat trans people like inherently fragile designated victims (to be avoided if possible and coddled if not possible), rather than just ordinary people who happen to be trans\u00e2\u0080\u0094if you were a business owner, you wouldn't want to hire someone who you couldn't fire without fearing a lawsuit, and if you can't not-hire them without also fearing a lawsuit, conveniently happening to lose their resume starts looking like a good life strategy! You can't outlaw Bayesian reasoning and feedback mechanisms! I understand why it's tempting to think that you can, but don't hate the player; hate the game-theoretic nature of all life!",
+
+ people treat an organisation with more respect and status than simply bunch of people\n\nYes, exactly! This is an exciting arbitrage opportunity for agents who care less about respect and status (in the eyes of people who respect institutions; they may care about an alternative gray/black market of respect and status), and more about Doing Things That Make Sense Even If That's Not the Way Things Are Done Around Here.",
+
+"I think sufficiently self-aware, sufficiently prosocial narcissists and sociopaths deserve love! I hope I don't have any ulterior motives for saying this! (I don't _think_ I'm a narcissist or a sociopath, but people can have false beliefs about themselves.)",
+
+My personal paraphrase of the common theme in this and other \"What were they thinking??\" thinkpieces is: \"Defecting against the victimhood identity politics mind-virus is more important than whichever schmuck happens to be President\". I live in non-swing-state California and voted for Gary Johnson, but I actually agree with this now, if only because I'm terrified that the victimhood identity politics mind-virus is trying to eat the next generation of people like me and no one else seems to care, to the extent that I had a delusional nervous breakdown and spent three miserable days in a psychiatric hospital, which three days could have been longer if it weren't for my quick wit (specifically, the ability, when feeling threatened, to use verbal skills to manipulate social reality rather than describe actual reality), the fact that the other patients/inmates knew the security code, and Michael Vassar's willingness to pretend to be a doctor.\n\nI'm sorry to keep telling this story over and over, but this is analogous to a religious conversion experience (I want people to explicitly engineer social technologies that provide the good parts of traditional religions and institutions, but more fun and without the lies: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5t/can_humanism_match_religions_output/), and I don't have any practice being a missionary! Please bear with me!"
+
+who should be classified as having the Bad Man property and therefore be excluded from coalitions!
+
+
+ thanks for the marketing advice! I should _definitely_ take that into account if I ever decide to put more effort into \"persuading people\", which sounds like something that an aspiring instrumental rationalist would care about. Perhaps unfortunately, however, I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist: all I can do is try to communicate what I actually think and feel using clear language (and standard rhetorical techniques like sarcasm, satire, &c. that people know how to interpret even if they wouldn't be clear if someone na\u00c3\u00afvely took the words literally). If other people aren't persuaded by this ... maybe they _shouldn't_ be! Maybe I can live with that!"
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff