In contrast, "See Color"'s attacks on old-school liberalism _land_. We open to a '90s-alike PSA invoking the "doesn't matter if you're black, white, or purple" trope (which has been cringe for as long as I (born 1987) can remember, but which I imagine sounded progressive the _first_ time someone said it), until Amethyst breaks character to object to the script—
-> AMETHYST: Woah, woah, woah. Hold up a minute here. Ugh, who wrote this? I think it kind of _does_ matter that I'm purple? I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien.
+> AMETHYST: What the—woah, woah, woah. Hold up a minute here. Ugh, who wrote this? I think it kind of _does_ matter that I'm purple? I mean, I'm purple because I'm literally an alien.
>
> BLACK KID: Well I'm not an alien, but it definitely matters to me that I'm black.
>
How is the old-school liberal to reply to this? The function of saying "or purple" is to appeal to a _principle_ of equal treatment. Adding a fantasy race in there highlights the universality of our commitment to equality: purple magical alien gem superheroines might not exist, but if they _did_, they would be entitled to the same rights and dignity as everyone.
-But how should our principle of majestic equality be applied? [Categories summarize information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)—[cluster-structure in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace). As a matter of AI design, there would be no _functional_ reason to assign entities to different categories, if they didn't differ in _some_ decision-relevant ways. The reason it's pretty weird to reference Amethyst's skin color in a lesson about human racism, is because the challenges Amethyst might face as a gem in a world of humans—perhaps the perceptual skew of living thousands of years when most humans don't see a hundred—is going to depend on the ways in which gems and humans are actually different.
+But how should our principle of majestic equality be applied? [Categories summarize information](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries)—[cluster-structure in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace). As a matter of AI design, there would be no _functional_ reason to assign entities to different categories, if they didn't differ in _some_ decision-relevant ways. The reason it's pretty weird to reference Amethyst's skin color in a lesson about human racism, is because the challenges Amethyst might face as a gem in a world of humans—perhaps the perceptual skew of living thousands of years when most humans don't see a hundred—is going to depend on the ways in which gems and humans are actually different, which don't apply to humans of different races who are relevantly the same.
In this way, we see that old-school liberalism is effectively the position that race _shouldn't exist_ as a cognitively meaningful category. But is it that easy? If there's some sense in which race _does_ exist—even just as a social "type tag" based on superficial anatomy markers in humans who are [otherwise totally biologically the same](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/)—then verbally claiming to pretend that it doesn't, isn't a realistic or _honest_ strategy for remediating the harm done by [unfair conventions that culturally evolved around the presence of the category](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).
----
+[TODO: add back just enough of the pronoun discussion to contextualize the quote]
+
During a recent discussion of pronoun conventions, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the _Zeitgeist_ that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):
> I can imagine a sane society using _he_ and _she_ to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average **conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.** (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)
The legal changes required for the twentieth-century doctors' innovation was sponsored by [the political coalition of individually non-hegemonic identity groups](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/), whose organizing principle had always been to fight on behalf of the marginalized—those who, without the coalition's sponsorship, would have been victimized by the hegemonic social order.
-But when the source of a coalition's power rests on the loyalty of the victims it protects, and of their allies, then those seeking to win more power for the coalition have an incentive to both _create more victims_, and _distinguish loyal from fair-weather allies_.
+But when the source of a coalition's power rests on the loyalty of the victims it protects, and of their allies, then those seeking to win more power for the coalition have an incentive to both create more victims, and distinguish loyal from fair-weather allies.
Aggressively marketing "being trans" as an atomic identity that everyone needs to celebrate on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide, serves both functions: a lot of autogynephilic young men and [quirky but impressionable teenage girls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_onset_gender_dysphoria_controversy) get recruited to the victimhood coalition (who might have otherwise gotten married and joined the power base of the hegemonic social order), _and_ everyone who cares about having a public concept of biological sex gets "outed" as an insufficiently-loyal ally (who can't free-ride off the coalition's successes without contributing). [It works even better if](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/real-meaning-of-diversity/) any group that doesn't have the necessary quota of trans people is marked for political attack on the grounds of being insufficiently inclusive.
As a transhumanist, I believe that fantasies deserve to be fulfilled—but _actually_ fulfilled, fulfilled _for real_, not humored by everyone forcing everyone else to pretend in order to maintain the equilibrium in some idiot political game.
-I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just _want_ it. (I would want it if the technology were better.) But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about this mysterious "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, [_isn't helping those people_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/). Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt it's helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only _knew_ in detail what they were selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.
+I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just _want_ it. (I would want it if the technology were better.) But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about this mysterious "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, [_isn't helping those people_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/). Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt it's helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only _knew_ in detail what they're selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.
And, and—that poor deer!
(Bolding mine.)
-[TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598 ]
+[TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers]
[TODO: Hirchfield and Ellis]
This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
-[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it", linkback to "Point Man"]
+[TODO: ↑ soften tone, be more precise, including about "dumb enough to fall for it"]
If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
- Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to
_ E.Y. as case study on unconscious-lying and self-report
+2021+ significant posts—
+_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data (April?)
+_ Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (May?)
+_ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (June?)
+
+
LW—
_ Overlapping Distributions and Cancellable Stereotypes
- And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
_ Reddit: /r/philosophy, /r/TheMotte, /r/theschism, /r/SneerClub
_ tags: "The SF Bay Area", "Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement", "Postmortems & Retrospectives"
-_ Stereotypes are weak probabilistic inferences (Agreeableness d~0.5), category-membership is strong inference, the same word/signal hits both, but stereotypes are (or should be) easy to cancel
+_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
+_ Stereotypes are weak probabilistic inferences (Agreeableness d~0.5), category-membership is strong inference, the same word/signal hits both, but stereotypes are (or should be) easy to cancel; shifting default meaning onto stereotypes in order to suit trans (while still having the word attach to something) is a bad trade
_ Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
_ Beyond the Binary
_ https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3936528276381860 "Natural does not always mean good." — natural does not always mean good, but at our current tech level, that's actually a really good prior
_ reply on psych prison https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4uvgb4/?context=3
_ Irreversible Damage review
_ Jessica/wiz AGP defense
-_ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
_ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data prior: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/how-many-trans-folk-are-there-really/ https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/getting-lost-in-the-crowd/
_ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
_ Comment on "Towards decolonising computational sciences" https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14258
_ the scapegoating dynamic
_ review of "What's the Big Secret?" (acknowledges gender-role conventions which are more salient when people are wearing clothes, but then tells the real answer)
_ reply to https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/hermeneutical-injustice-not-gaslighting/
-_ four clusters
_ Comment on "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepcliq/ https://doxa.substack.com/p/googles-colosseum
- Amy Wax linkpost
- The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
This is completely discrediting!!!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/
-> they’re not necessarily rejecting the seriousness of child abuse, only saying it’s not the kind of thing they build their categories around.
+> they're not necessarily rejecting the seriousness of child abuse, only saying it’s not the kind of thing they build their categories around.
(My Identity Has a Better Brier Score)
I'm skeptical of "ace"—I think it's just an identity label that can be successfully marketed to otherwise-ordinary people in the bottom-quartile of libido, by an ideology that wants to sell people identity labels to get them to join the coalition of sexual minorities
_ Film Review: Your Name
_ World of Masks https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1228093035042541569
_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
-_ "I Tell Myself to Let the Story End"; Or, A Hill of Validity ... (UUT)
_ glomerular filtration rate https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_25_2020/frvrhwg/
_ I Am Very Bad at Keeping Secrets and Am Therefore Very Reluctant to Offer Confidentiality Promises
Sections I should be able to easily make progress-per-minute on—
* Dr. Will Powers
+Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598).
+I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers
-
* wipe culturally defined values: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement (this might have to go after Failed-Utopia #4-2)
* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession "Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a profession discovers a sense of beauty in it." same thing with an ideology; http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/
* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
* Singularity/paperclip/Methods/existential risk
* "non-exclusively androphilic" / nonhomosexual
+"A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (need to use it somewhere, and this is my capstone)
* everyone who wants to talk about AGP to call us predators
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff
