I knew better than to behave like that. My failure didn't mean I had been wrong about everything, that I should humbly resign myself to the Student Bucket forever and never dare to question it again—but it did mean that I must have been wrong about _something_. I could [update myself incrementally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally)—but I _did_ need to update. (Probably, that "math" encompasses different subskills, and that my glorious self-study had unevenly trained some skills and not others: there was nothing contradictory or unreal about my [successfully generalizing one of the methods in the differential equations textbook to arbitrary numbers of variables](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15143/does-the-method-for-solving-exact-des-generalize-like-this) while also [struggling with the class's assigned problem sets](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/7984/automatizing-computational-skills).)
-Someone who uncritically validated my dislike of the Student Bucket rather than assessing my reasons, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, not a map that reflects my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than denying it or claiming that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism could match the standard set by schools, even if it hadn't that time. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When I interviewed for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)
+Someone who uncritically validated my dislike of the Student Bucket rather than assessing my reasons, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, not a map that reflects my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than denying it or claiming that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism could match the standard set by schools, even if it hadn't that time. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two courses in Java and C++ I took at community college. When I interviewed for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)
If you can see why uncritically affirming people's current self-image isn't the solution to "student dysphoria", it should be clear why the same applies to gender dysphoria. There's a general underlying principle: it matters whether that self-image is true.
Yudkowsky seems to put much less weight on theory #4 than I do, saying he mentions it "for completeness" and that he finds it "dubious as a complete account, because of how FtM used to produce more outrage back when men were higher-status." Yudkowsky's claims of alleged anti-FtM panic in history would greatly benefit from specific examples; it's not hard to find cases that imply a more nuanced picture of historical attitudes towards transmasculinity.
- For example, [Deborah Sampson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Sampson) impersonated a man in order to serve in the American Revolutionary War, successfully petitioned for back pay after being honorably discharged, and gave lectures about her military service. Other cases of females living as men, like those of stagecoach driver [Charley Parkhurst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Parkhurst) or politician [Murray Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Hall_(politician)) seem to have been met with more curiosity than horror upon posthumous discovery. [An 1880 obituary of Parkhurst in the _San Francisco Call_](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1880/01/09/98876579.pdf) described his career in glowing terms (and with masculine pronouns) before expressing outright admiration: "[t]hat a young woman should assume man's attire and, friendless and alone, defy the dangers of the voyage of 1849 to the then almost mythical California—dangers over which hardy pioneers still grow boastful—has in it sufficient of the wonderful." [A 1901 obituary of Hall in _The New York Times_](http://archive.today/2025.09.14-170351/https://www.nytimes.com/1901/01/19/archives/murray-hall-fooled-many-shrewd-men-how-for-years-she-masqueraded-in.html) expresses astonishment rather than condemnation: "How a woman could for so many years impersonate a man without detection, deceiving even her physician and some of the cleverest men and women in New York with whom she frequently came in contact, though the secret must have been known to at least two others—the wives—is a mystery quite as inexplicable as the character that accomplished the feat."
+ For example, [Deborah Sampson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Sampson) impersonated a man in order to serve in the American Revolutionary War, successfully petitioned for back pay after being honorably discharged, and gave lectures about her military service. Other cases of females living as men, like those of stagecoach driver [Charley Parkhurst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Parkhurst) or politician [Murray Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Hall_(politician)) seem to have been met with more curiosity than horror upon posthumous discovery. [An 1880 obituary of Parkhurst in the _San Francisco Call_](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1880/01/09/98876579.pdf) described his career in glowing terms (and with masculine pronouns) before expressing outright admiration: "That a young woman should assume man's attire and, friendless and alone, defy the dangers of the voyage of 1849 to the then almost mythical California—dangers over which hardy pioneers still grow boastful—has in it sufficient of the wonderful." [A 1901 obituary of Hall in _The New York Times_](http://archive.today/2025.09.14-170351/https://www.nytimes.com/1901/01/19/archives/murray-hall-fooled-many-shrewd-men-how-for-years-she-masqueraded-in.html) expresses astonishment rather than condemnation: "How a woman could for so many years impersonate a man without detection, deceiving even her physician and some of the cleverest men and women in New York with whom she frequently came in contact, though the secret must have been known to at least two others—the wives—is a mystery quite as inexplicable as the character that accomplished the feat."
The occasion of the present post is that Yudkowsky goes on to say:
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/a-psychological-theory-of-the-culture
> From their perspective, the "expert consensus" and "peer-reviewed studies" on the efficacy of covid-19 vaccines look no different from those that tell you men can get pregnant. Since you know men can’t get pregnant, why trust the vaccine?
-Surrender on sports: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1536691117265080321
+Washington Post surrendering on sports: https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1536691117265080321
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-gender-ideology-cant-survive
No, but I think some who aren't men in a strictly descriptive sense should be referred to as men for reasons of politeness.
quote-Tweeting Biles
-https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1931180767453000002
\ No newline at end of file
+https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1931180767453000002
+
+And indeed, he was lying—
+
+> Seriously why can’t you people just give up on the trans stuff it’s like 20% of what drove this country crazy.
+https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1974329700278575108
+
+2022 as peak trans, 20 October
+https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1980463717423972515
+
+I'm unstable and sensitive, but not warm
+https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1980524187782689057/photo/4
\ No newline at end of file
I started reading the outrageous Goldberg book yesterday: I'm actually kind of impressed. Goldberg is very explicit about what he's saying and what he is not saying, and he makes the fact/value distinction very clear. The introduction ends: "I hope you find this trip illuminating and enjoyable and remember that nothing here commits you to any moral or political view you do not like." This is the kind of clarity and rigor that I'm just not used to seeing from the likes of Bettina Aptheker. Still, I should worry that my reading has been unbalanced. More worrisome: I _say_ (as Goldberg says) that I take the fact/value distinction very seriously, but I should remember that humans aren't built to do this consistently. Could I be developing racist or misogynistic attitudes? It's practically a standard failure mode: science-minded young man holds disdain against women for (he thinks:) not being as smart and science-minded as him. _I'm_ not at all like that, but—well, one of the big themes of my grand dream-of-a-novel is that it's possible to be mistaken about what you really are. So I think it's important to have an image of who you _want_ to be, as distinct from how you-the-physical-system actually are. The former can be whatever you want it to be, whereas the latter is a belief-of-fact and must be determined _only_ by the evidence (and your prior—although I fear Bayes is mostly still but a password unto me). So I have to ask the question as if it were any other ordinary question, such as about rocks or something: do I have misogynistic attitudes? If it makes sense to speak of stripping away my autogynephila and my explicitly egalitarian-individualist ideology, would my very soul be revealed as male? And if so, what can I do about it? What violence could I inflict upon me to make me my _self_?
-I don't think I ever told you: someday it would be nice to experiment with some androgen-blocking drugs—you know, to see what it would feel like to be on them. But if I'm going to do something like that, it would be nice to have a better job and not be living with my parents—oh Diary, how it all hangs together! Oh, Diary, how ridiculously stupid we all are! —[real initials redacted]
+I don't think I ever told you: someday it would be nice to experiment with some androgen-blocking drugs—you know, to see what it would feel like to be on them. But if I'm going to do something like that, it would be nice to have a better job and not be living with my parents—oh Diary, how it all hangs together! Oh, Diary, how ridiculously stupid we all are! —ZMD
> Two fanfics for me: “Rusting in the Rain” by keystoneofscience (My Life as a Teenage Robot, FFN) and “Once in a Half Century” by MundyMorn (Duck Dodgers, AO3).
>
> These two fics both deal with the world moving on without you, and the hold they’ve had on me is insane.
-
https://x.com/MysteryNoel16/status/1755783106886541501
https://x.com/veaulans/status/1806785280273486110
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/227419?context=8#context
https://www.themotte.org/post/1689/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/299627?context=8#context
-https://www.themotte.org/post/1689/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/301460?context=8#context
\ No newline at end of file
+https://www.themotte.org/post/1689/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/301460?context=8#context
+
+DSL September 2025
+https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,14219.0.html
+
+https://x.com/warty_dog/status/1972440077017219541
+> did you ever hear the tragedy of Zack Davis the Wise? Ironic. He could save others from transitioning, but not himself
+
+> you're actually a perfect example of this too: an obvious trans woman who nevertheless somehow eludes most every elegant attempt to define you as one
+https://x.com/Ancapta/status/2001725261809614996
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1553.msg38755.html
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/10vx6gk/the_categories_were_made_for_man_not_man_for_the/j7k8fjc/
https://twitter.com/niplav_site/status/1744304380503904616
+https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/1985025781525803269 (not in response to SSC)
+https://x.com/adrusi/status/1992038743201706167 (by a trans woman, in response to a Nov. 2025 cite)
+https://x.com/exa_bite/status/1992448005488947308 (same thread, quote-Tweeting me from 2021)
Still citing it (8 October 2024): https://x.com/tinkady2/status/1843686002977910799
Still citing it (7 Jan 25): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X6soKvPmCJ2fkw5zY/don-t-fall-for-ontology-pyramid-schemes
+
+
+
------
If you _have_ intent-to-inform and occasionally end up using your megaphone to say false things (out of sloppiness or motivated reasoning in the passion of the moment), it's actually not that big of a deal, as long as you're willing to acknowledge corrections. (It helps if you have critics who personally hate your guts and therefore have a motive to catch you making errors, and a discerning audience who will only reward the critics for finding real errors and not fake errors.) In the long run, the errors cancel out.
> The censorship policy of the Reign of Terror is not part of the content of the post itself and may not be debated on the post. If you think Censorship!! is a terrible idea and invalidates discussion, feel free not to read the comments section.
> The Internet is full of things to read that will not make you angry. If it seems like you choose to spend a lot of time reading things that will give you a chance to be angry and push down others so you can be above them, you're not an interesting plant to have in my garden and you will be weeded. I don't consider it fun to get angry at such people, and I will choose to read something else instead.
+His comment policy changed at some point, which might be evidence that he read pt. 3?
+
I tried arguing against ideas _first!_
I do wonder how much of his verbal report is shaped by pedagogy (& not having high-quality critics). People are very bad at imagining how alien aliens would be! "Don't try to hallucinate value there; just, don't" is simpler than working out exactly how far to push cosmopolitanism
And—okay, this is what might be worth a response (in time, it's not time-critical, but would also grow stale on the timescale of months) there's also the angle that the ontological categories are useful specifically because they make predictions across many different situations that aren't easy to enumerate in advance, even if, in some particular situation, you might want a "cis women only" category.
----
+
+September
+
+In Portland, Celene had commented that the thread was clearly subtweeting me
+wasting a few days on this so as not to let him have the last object-level word? Worth it?
+Not even posting to LW to save my drama budget
+
+https://x.com/zackmdavis/status/1967335980970713547
+http://unremediatedgender.space/2025/Sep/a-generic-ontological-finickiness/
+
+Literally that very afternoon, he Tweeted—
+https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1967384442491769282
+> If two knowledgable nerds debate something in a forum or blog chain, one who leaves out or distorts important facts can be embarrassed when the other nerd calls them on it. Journalists control whole presentations. It'd be crazy to trust them as much as nerds arguing online.
+
+It's tempting to comment, "In my experience, this doesn't work very well when one of the nerds has a bigger megaphone: 200K-follower nerd vs. 1300-follower nerd is actually pretty similar to 200K-follower nerd vs. journalist." but that would be dishonorable begging for enagement; I'm done with him. (The one top-level post to not let him have the last word was fine, but no begging.)
+
+This is also good ammunition for the Said conflict!
+
+And he does have a point with
+> I'm saying, it's rarely going to measure up to a six-deep chain of nerd blog posts.
+
+In that, the bullshit he's spinning now is much less egregious than "30% of the ones with penises"; I _did_ improve the discourse, and he _did_ give me some credit for it (in the 2021 Facebook post)
+
+-----
+
+16 September 2025, I went to the Sequences reading group because one of the assigned readings was mine ("Heads I Win"); I used the breakout group to talk about the Said ban (I had an on-topic angle: if you censor criticism, that's a form of filtering evidence, but we didn't really focus on the angle)
+
+Megan Crawford Siskind got really upset and shook, and left the room (actually came and left a couple times), before leaving the last time, she said, "I feel condescended to". The first time she left I said, "Thanks for chatting."
+
+When I went back to Aumann to get something to drink, and coming back, I saw Megan with her head on Oli's shoulder
+
+breakout-group member David was boring
+
+-----
+
+19 September, while working on "'Yes, and' Requires the Possibility", I Googled `collaborative truthseeking`, expecting to bring up my question (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvqd3YiBcrPxXzxQM/what-does-the-word-collaborative-mean-in-the-phrase); instead, the top link was a post by ... Gleb Tsipursky! (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ckwzjbfHTCdPs2Y4J/collaborative-truth-seeking) who was run out of town for being a bullshitter (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fn7bo8sYEHS3RPKQG/concerns-with-intentional-insights)
+
+----
+
+Eva was the only person in the Eliezerfic glowfic server who "got it"; when I talked to Ben in January 2025, he mentioned the idea of dating Eva; but I had silently assumed she was trans (to the point where I didn't even see alpha in finding out more info?)
+
+----
+
+https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1973135992950497547
+> We have two daughters and a son so the kids are really really invested in the next one being a boy, as a matter of fairness, and consider it fairly outrageous that we will not simply agree to this very reasonable request of theirs
+
+I don't know how she does it with a straight face!!!
+
+-----
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/anFrGMskALuH7aZDw/this-is-a-review-of-the-reviews?commentId=zex2G8Z3shEJsSqx7#zex2G8Z3shEJsSqx7
+> The word and actual connotations of anal-retentive are important to my sentence.
+
+I don't actually think this is exclupatory. When someone complains about "greedy Jews",
+
+as with "ontologically finicky", I don't think this is exclupatory; if you're using these pejorative terms about rationality, that kind of suggests that you don't actually care about rationality.
+
+If you complain about greedy Jews, it probably means that you don't like Jews in general because you think they're greedy, rather than because you're criticizing subset of greediest Jews specifically
+
+----
+
+Opus 4.1 knows me
+https://claude.ai/share/db437186-d444-423e-a7eb-b8ef7a642924
+
+But ChatGPT 5 just knows I'm in the LessWrong sphere, without distinguishing detail: https://chatgpt.com/share/69023209-616c-8005-b7a3-90dc67734d16
+
+I was going to say, and the fact that it knows me and my gender conflict as ZMD, not Saotome-Westlake, shows that the memoir made a splash, but actually, Opus 4.1 does know MTSW
+
+in the era of "Failed Utopia 4-2", I was amazed that I had an impact on the canon by pointing out the Stephen Grass collision, but I would have a larger impact later
+
+----
+
+https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1557946545705820161
+> last time i posted on lesswrong the comments made me feel bad so i just can't bring myself to post there again. doesnt matter how reasonable my brain tries to be about it my body is like FUCK THAT
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3LcyoqNTJuCZ65MbL/mo-putera-s-shortform?commentId=FGjF3cA2SfGZu6op5
+> The world is full of people who have no immediate neighbors and problems that only one person can solve and other people cannot solve in quite the same way. I don’t think I’m unusual in looking around myself in that highly multidimensional space and not finding a ton of neighbors ready to take over.
+
+-----
+
+My advance prediction coming true, no one will notice or care (when I talked to Mike, he admitted that Scratch obsession was male, but it doesn't make a difference): "the other lotion is listening to the mommy lotion and the daddy lotion and the nelya lotion" https://discord.com/channels/343071095546707979/343072302214414338/1433175188685586615
+
+----
+
+@AnniePosting said hi to me at LessOnline (and wrote me a huge compliment DM on pt. 3), but has me blocked now
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ophhRzHyt44qcjnkS/trying-to-understand-my-own-cognitive-edge
+
+----
+
+CronoDAS is AGP, too? Join the club: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gEETjfjm3eCkJKesz/why-i-transitioned-a-case-study?commentId=M8bbzNM7NcwGTHw9W
+
+signing up to DSL as zmdavis, despite everything (after my Portland visit)
+
+----
+
+December 2019
+> Required time for getting over hero-worship is superlinear in initial hero size, possibly cubic
+https://x.com/zackmdavis/status/1203921687017742336
+
+I used Cade Metz as an example in https://x.com/zackmdavis/status/1537338910606360576/photo/3 before I ever met him
+
+----
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform/comment/3EGxCndmhBR3Fnix8
+> I haven’t been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience
+
+Because it's not sympathetic!!
+
+This is days after he retweeted Crowley on "why would you ever challenge Scott", just ...
+
+-----
+
+> Last year’s draft of pt. 5 included a section replying to David Xu (who I read as deeply sycophantic to Yudkowsky), but he seems to “get it” now.
+https://nitter.space/davidxu90/status/1843758339634921965
+
+----
+
+(Harth’s recent comments on vibes are particularly notable in the context of high praise had had for me recently (“this nagging sense that I sometimes have that Zack is the ~only person on this platform who is actually doing rationality in a completely straight-forward way as intended, and everyone else is playing some kind of social game”). I guess this is what we’re working with in the current year?)
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e4GBj6jxRZcsHFSvP/assume-bad-faith?commentId=qzZi594sytjZFDzei
+
+------
+
+Justin Murphy spot-checking Aella (whom Yudkowsky had recently grandiosely praised https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1p1cowy/according_to_yud_aella_is_one_of_earths_top/): https://x.com/jmrphy/status/1992022025150300272
+
+----
+
+> I usually don't self-describe as a "rationalist". From my perspective as I'd carefully phrase it now, my actual thing is: An interest in general laws governing which cognitive patterns have what empirical consequences. Eg, what thought patterns produce truth vs falsehood.
+https://x.com/allTheYud/status/1994507395629027640
+
+This is the right explicit attitude to have, but it's in contraction to the ingroup signal-boosting ... I wonder if I should comment about that ... or just save it for pt. 5
+
+---
+
+The Ziz denial post avoiding even naming transgenders, as a precious victim group
+
+----
+
+https://x.com/allTheYud/status/1994158042670350671
+> Take ASI. It's just gonna kill you. The entire EA industry of having more sophisticated and clever AI takes than this was net harmful to humanity and canceled out all the other good that EAs ever did.
+
+I mean, this is true as consequentialism (if the only thing that matters is that ASI is never built, then sensemaking about AI is harmful)
+
+----
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/isSBwfgRY6zD6mycc/eliezer-s-unteachable-methods-of-sanity
+
+If it's not about you, why is this entire post about you being superior to everyone else?
+
+> She knows what will happen, and speaks truth anyway; because the people trading truths with each other cannot afford to stop and lose their sanity, whatever the screeching packs of monkeys surrounding them.
+https://x.com/allTheYud/status/1998851819481825470
+
+more simping for Aella
+
+------
+
+I didn't want to say nothing
+https://x.com/zackmdavis/status/1999017546150981923
+
+----
+
+Jan. 2024
+https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1742817284606021757
+> There is this concept called Socratic questioning where you let someone think about a question before you tell them your own answer.
+
+Jun. 2024
+https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1801746339245789418
+> I don't think they understand the intended generalization, which is not "This exact thing will happen with SGD" as they triumphantly refute by saying "Evolution is not SGD!", but rather "Look at all this weird shit that happened and how much happened at the last minute."
+
+Apr. 2024 Jessica and EY on my function-approximators post
+https://x.com/jessi_cata/status/1775215952889774375
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/28h6eYNY66MpjqFTA/why-does-eliezer-make-abrasive-public-comments
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpguaocJ4y7E3ccuw/contradict-my-take-on-openphil-s-past-ai-beliefs
+> I think they are failing to appreciate the extent to which mere tolerance of dissenting discussion is not central, in an organizational-psychology analysis of what a large faction actually does
+
+
+https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2004965871652147487
+> Asked Opus 4.5 to collect older definitions of personhood and evaluate itself under each. This was a 😬😬 "I sure am talking to an AGI" moment for me; most Twitter discourse on the topic is waaay less coherent.
+
+----
+
+December 2025: $1K MIRI donation and Interactive Buddy Twitter gambit
+https://claude.ai/chat/ff889cbb-6edd-4af9-93a9-707fac80da33
+https://claude.ai/chat/ff889cbb-6edd-4af9-93a9-707fac80da33
+
+https://www.aaronbergman.net/p/public-intellectuals
+
+------
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/9DhneE5BRGaCS2Cja/moderation-notes-re-recent-said-duncan-threads/comment/zLjfB9v3eTWmpWEdx
+> I have in my internal monologue indeed basically fully shifted towards using “lying” and “deception” the way Zack, Benquo and Jessica are using it, because their concept seems to carve reality at its joints much better than my previous concept of lying and deception. This despite me telling them many times that their usage of those terms is quite adversarial and gaslighty.
\ No newline at end of file
https://x.com/aliceisplaying/status/1960419357898526844
> major tpot milestone at london office hours: we have achieved an equal gender ratio (7 cîs men, 6 trans women, 1 cĩs woman)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JH6tJhYpnoCfFqAct/the-company-man good way of putting it—
+> These events she is cursed to experience on the regular given her unusual physical and intellectual perfection and presence in an overwhelmingly male environment where she is presumed to embody the deranged fantasies and hopes of a certain class of male nerd who, in their narcissism, seek a woman-shaped fun-house-mirror reflection of their own psychology, a fundamentally cowardly and dehumanizing form of infatuation which fills her with a sort of disgust she had never fully intellectualized until witnessing my parody of that genre of interaction.
+
+----
+
+[I read an anecodote about the best female students doing what they're told, and the best male students doing something creative—why didn't I save it in this file? is it in my Twitter bookmarks?]
+
+---
+
+I think it was Wayne Burkett on Twitter who stressed telling children "When you get married and have kids of your own", treating it as an inevitability. (Going to college felt like a cultural inevitability to me.) Even the Christian sex-ed book I got for comparison says, "And maybe you will get married and be a father yourself someday", rather than "when" (although it's still treated as more probable than in libtopia)
+
+----
+
+Christiano's arguments that evolution should select for longtermism require a high intelligence level—I believe it for AIs, but the fact that smart humans can't be bothered to breed implies that even we aren't thinking about the long term
+
+----
+
+I used the "I don't think I want to talk about it at the library" line with Kate, and it didn't seem "bad" the way JDP thought it was bad when I said it to Mimi—but the key difference is that Kate and I weren't on a date
+
+---
+
+How would you find out whether IQ-dysgenic fertility averages also mean that the top end is dropping?
+
+----
+
+L./E.-K.W. who expressed interest in me was upset that her mother didn't take her side (regarding some sort of comparison between her and her rival), and upset that I didn't take her side against her mother not taking her side—but I didn't have the facts of the matter! Even Alicorn understood that.
+
+Has my perma-anxiety shut down opportunities with women that I didn't even notice? (compare "luck surface area")
+https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-i-overcame-anxiety
+
+Jacob Falkovich: "only marry someone whose feedback you want as your reward function"
+I don't feel that way about anyone
+
+
+https://lightbrd.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1932891556391821425
+> You don’t have to psyop yourself into liking women in public social ways—if anything, that’s more unnatural than acknowledging that adult friendships really should be same-sex. You just have to like one particular woman in private personal ways. 95% of my Twitter audience is male
+> “Should be” doesn’t mean “to appease moralists, you must fight against your natural urge to discuss gossip & shopping with gal pals over brunch, with perfectly calibrated levels of exaggerated sympathy & enthusiasm, & lots of passive aggression”—it’s just recognition of the truth
+> Well-adjusted 30-year-old married guys really just have no business preferring social interactions with women to interactions with men. Your 20s are for figuring this out (“that convo went bad bc she seemed to be using words as context cues rather than logical tools… how odd!”).
+> My wife & I get along quite well, & eg she’s perhaps the only woman who regularly reads my feed here, but what she gets out of it has to do with our personal relationship, not abstract ideology or historical trivia. Likewise for vice-versa. “I love my wife bc she’s a woman” is 😬
+> Of course, your love of wife shouldn’t be premised on *hating* the feminine in women—if anything, the opposite is often healthiest—but if your love for her is just generic love for socially interacting with feminine archetypes then that’s not a great foundation for your household
+> & yes I go perhaps too far: I prefer feminine baristas, feminine secretaries, feminine decorators, feminine coordinators, etc; & it’s of course nice for families to be friends with other families (eg for couples to be friends as couples with other couples as couples). But, y’know
+
+https://preseed.getupstream.co/
+
+https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1975775645495152674
+> Sometimes I think women find us as incoherent at this character-larping as we find them at argument-making. The problem is they can’t coherently argue that we’re as incoherent at frame game relative to them as they are at args relative to us, but their “frames” often suggest this
+
+> Like how you can’t ask girls out by seeming desperate or making an arg for why she should like you. You have to present as someone with options who happens to be interested in her. She’d much rather be attracted to your args—“those look high status”—than hectored by facts & logic
+
+
+https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1819065312836571533
+> Even as they worship reward-functions, they don’t understand that (by definition) reward-functions reward behaviors antecedent to rewards, not reward-seeking itself: sensations are to tell you which conditions to condition for, not for sensitivity training
+channeling TurnTrout
+
+
+Even Claire Lehmann didn't know the "male" vocabulary words
+https://x.com/clairlemon/status/1976490212898504767
+
+Helen Joyce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG9_lcln7FU
+
+https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1975636419629727771
+> Words better known by men vs women. Former are all eg things men use to impartially measure or seize the world (femtosecond, milliamp, katana, howitzer, etc); latter are all eg things women use to be measured by the partial world & seized. Once you see it-
+
+https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1977231259207160101
+> Every hobbyist knows that once your (pretty much by definition) all-male group gets its first female, the focus on hobbyism goes out the window; craft, expertise, & camaraderie based on honest subject-specific pecking orders get hurled out the window, & then more women join, etc.
+
+trans partisans notice, too
+https://x.com/hausofdecline/status/1978468433294754294
+
+https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1978220044778639624
+> Ditto for guys, except (bc of our plentiful cheap gametes) our “scenes” are way more scaleable—ie science, politics, etc rather than just sociality—& we deal in propositional thoughts rather than just relational & emotional & prescriptive ones. Thus as anons we clarify unPC facts
+
+https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1979224809360839028
+> Male-skewed social networks are for textually arguing with strangers about external things. Female-skewed social networks are for visually posing with friends about personal things. Twitter vs Insta; forums vs moodboards. Girls who make marks are butch; guys who are marks are fey
+
+My unwritten juvenillia rose the question of "Maybe I'm the real sexist, for not accepting women as they are", my unwritten juvenillia "Replacement" rose the question of birthrates—I'm only now taking these questions seriously.
+
+I should have written that Diary entry when the conversation with Sarah Constantin was fresh; she regretted participating in Vassar-circle, she said Ben was trying to get people to criticize a billionaire, and Sarah thought that was bad, because it was a patronage scene (which is a thing that has played out many times in history); you don't bite the hand that feeds you
+
+Maybe I had the eterna-bachelor intellectual phenotype anyway, but it used to be 10%, not 40%: https://substack.com/home/post/p-173751882
+
+https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/transgender-youth-skrmetti/683350/
+
+https://x.com/hollowearthterf/status/1979361954688045295
+> Autistic men are often evil because they develop narcissistic personality disorder as a cope for their social ineptitude
+
+> What leftists understand intuitively is that whiplash only lasts a generation and then those people die and everything starts over with a new setpoint for what’s ridiculous and unthinkable
+https://x.com/xwanyex/status/1979893428642251050
+
+> To a great extent it is out of an individual's control whether he or she will get married and have a family. Marriage and child-rearing have never been individual pursuits for individual reward, and still aren't, but collective institutions enforced by society for *its* benefit.
+https://x.com/mmjukic/status/1979890867558310186
+
+"The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess"
+https://archive.ph/T3tOX
+
+Piper vs. Wesley Yang: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1915986507665445371
+
+-----
+
+Helen Andrews's Great Feminization
+
+https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/
+https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-feminization-talking-point-as
+http://archive.today/2025.10.23-123005/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/opinion/helen-andrews-feminization-compact.html
+https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/what-helen-andrews-critics-get-wrong
+https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/26/feminism-cancel-culture-helen-andrews/
+https://www.slowboring.com/p/womens-professional-rise-is-good
+https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/opinion/women-workplace-feminism-conservative.html
+
+
+https://x.com/rclu/status/1979645639475749309
+> Much to say about Helen Andrews' "Great Feminization," but start here.
+>
+> If her premises were broadly true, the best advice for women would be to try to be as masculine as possible. How awful to be, or have to put up with, such contemptible creature as she takes women to be.
+
+This feels like an "I dare you to say the bad thing" maneuver, whereas Helen Andrews can just confront the bad thing
+
+-----
+
+Animaniacs 2020 changed the line to "Dot has wit", which feels forced like the inventor woman in "Brighter Than Today"
+
+https://normiemacdonald.substack.com/p/wives-are-for-closers
+https://normiemacdonald.substack.com/p/how-to-settle-down-get-married-and
+
+https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/3860106/how-divorce-redefined-marriage-statistics/
+
+> I think we should be consistent and protect trans people like people of an unpopular faith
+https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1981481292647825447
+Kelsey defending trans people as an unpopular religion is kind of a total victory; if that's all she has, she knows gender ID is a dead player
+
+https://x.com/goblinodds/status/1982444412614357489
+> i think something like "(the vast majority of) women want a man they feel they can surrender to" is true which i think is why high powered women and why nerdy men often have a hard time finding love
+>
+> it's hard to find a man worthy of your surrender when you're braver and more aggressive than the men you know, and it's hard to find a woman who's attracted to you if you arent willing to like. idk push her around a bit (without *actually* overriding her boundaries which-
+>
+> -can be a hard line for guys to walk)
+
+https://x.com/plasmarob/status/1982322300767871390
+> Respectfully all the men I know who like Rand can't get a girl let alone married
+>
+> to the point I've worried Rand is causing decline
+
+misandry + monogamy is bad for birthrates; women want something to look up to
+https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/1982232777656267151
+
+CEBK using the word "steelman": https://x.com/CEBKCEBKCEBK/status/1982904442417754502
+
+https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/joint-review-family-unfriendly-by
+
+Marrying a non-rationalist would be a de facto interfaith marriage—in that sense, Metz has a point
+
+https://baazaa.github.io/2024/12/06/dating.html
+
+Great why-I-transitioned post got deleted ... no, it's back now.
+http://archive.today/2025.11.02-020052/https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gEETjfjm3eCkJKesz/why-i-transitioned-a-case-study
+author comment—
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gEETjfjm3eCkJKesz/why-i-transitioned-a-case-study?commentId=jJe73P5SEKodAitgy
+> It's notable that in practice, transitioning did get me more love and affection, but only from other trans people (who I now effectively date exclusively). This is why the r/traa stage in this pipeline was critical: It provided a community of people who were willing to collectively look past all the costs of transitioning, and group up to provide trans people with what they actually wanted: love and affection and support, just coming from each other rather than the outside world.
+
+https://x.com/rawmilkhoney/status/1986000809423741151
+> This is why sometimes even very attractive men can’t seem to get a girl. She is perceiving something in you that tells her you are weak and the worst possible fate for a woman is to be with a weak man. She is psychologically built this way to protect her children.
+
+https://x.com/aimeeterese/status/1986064856139829417
+> Women don’t have allies, that’s the category error at the heart of this. Women evolved to compete as individuals against other women (for the best mates & for resources for our children) , whereas men compete in groups, against men from other tribes.
+>
+> Their groups contain a hierarchy, they’re cognisant of their rank within it, keenly aware of varying levels of capability of different members of their team, willing and able to mentor less experienced peers/subordinates, always cooperating and collaborating in an orderly fashion.
+>
+> Women literally did not evolve any such skill set, because we don’t have any use for other women in the major endeavours we undertake. Instead we pretend everyone is equal, and that we don’t compete, then we ruthlessly compete in a surreptitious not overt fashion, this is what we do best, that way we minimise exposure to open violence & risk of retaliation.
+
+https://x.com/minordissent/status/1986145903879880985
+> Especially given that they could become the property of the outgroup at any point in time if their men fail to defend the tribe effectively (war brides hypothesis), they don’t really see all that much of a loyalty or distinction to their ingroup vs their outgroup, especially if they are single and childless.
+
+https://x.com/yashkaf/status/1986811834079322445
+> I had many things going for me too: age 27, stable job, extraverted, attainable standards, looking for marriage, plus I actually like women and enjoy their company
+>
+> if you're playing on harder mode, you should expect this to take longer on average. how many hours in are you?
+
+https://x.com/simonsarris/status/1986553205292212592
+> It's actually mysterious how many smart single people there are that cannot find a partner.
+>
+> So many people want a well-defined thing, and that thing exists in droves, and they cannot find it. Also it's each-other.
+
+"Writing for the LLMs" was clear to me in July 2020!
+> Spend less time working and more time writing on the internet in order for a larger fraction of your soul to become part of the training data of the GPT-12-seeded superintelligent singleton. 1/2
+https://x.com/zackmdavis/status/1286118646838775808
+
+Wentworth's implicit antinatalism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hds7xkLgYtm6qDGPS/how-i-learned-that-i-don-t-feel-companionate-love?commentId=eqDJWytJBz2tMoKBp
+
+----
+
+https://x.com/jmrphy/status/1747181931115302926
+> I'm beginning to think that single men looking for a wife don't primarily need a wife. They need more intense male friends.
+>
+> A wife is someone you take care of, mostly. If you want intellectual intensity, write/speak/publish courageously until you earn it.
+>
+> It's on you, not her.
+
+https://x.com/jmrphy/status/1746744905861345290
+> "Talking about your interests" with your wife is wayyy overhyped in the minds of single men seeking marriage. My wife is smart and I never talk to her about my interests. I talk to men about my interests (how it's been for thousands of years).
+
+https://x.com/jmrphy/status/1878530998700556376
+> My wife just gave birth and it dawned on me that the modern Western maternity ward must be the most technologically sophisticated of any purely matriarchal enterprise that has ever existed.
+
+https://fertility-tools.netlify.app/costs/
+
+----
+
+https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1999557629748887897
+> Often a woman who doesn't want kids simply hasn't met the guy who magically sparked the child-desire in her, the 'i NEED to replicate this man' urge. It's rare and precious!
+> And the most tragic storyline is when a man inspires this in a woman, but doesn't want kids himself.
+
+https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-certain-madness-amok
+
+
+A memory of a teenage song—
+
+I would never touch you
+Not even with your consent
+No, I would never touch you
+Not even in my head
+I would never touch you
+But I have to know your ends
+That's why I evesdrop on all the things you say to your friends
+
+
+https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191866692.001.0001/q-oro-ed6-00008242
+> A parliament can do any thing but make a man a woman, and a woman a man.
+
+
+https://x.com/neerajadeshp/status/2011208067615174992
+> I think, though, I have seen men try to make it work with the marketing coordinator in Charlotte and not really succeed. Again, different from demanding a high IQ male autist in a woman’s body.
+
+
+
+https://x.com/useful_emetic/status/2011194771902197789
+
+Madame Fragonard
+@useful_emetic
+counterpoint: i’ve seen guys trying to find their exact iq match end up dating women with personality disorders and such. if they set cognitive horsepower as a non negotiable, they end up compromising on a bad personality than make the sacrifice in the looks department. it’s not fair or wise but it seems to be the reality.
+
+Madame Fragonard
+@useful_emetic
+now, that said, there’s a difference between an Applebees waitress and, like, a marketing coordinator in Charlotte who’s maybe bored by politics and doesn’t love to talk about it a ton
+
+Neeraja Deshpande
+@neerajadeshp
+I think, though, I have seen men try to make it work with the marketing coordinator in Charlotte and not really succeed. Again, different from demanding a high IQ male autist in a woman’s body.
+
+
+https://x.com/basilYam/status/2007138066453111076
+> Sometimes I’ll get involved with a guy (very very early days) and I’ll get a weird feeling like… I feel like you don’t like me. I feel like ur annoyed by my personality. Why do u keep showing up and trying to talk to me?
+
+https://x.com/basilYam/status/2010760708351541714
+> There’s also a type of guy who projects all over u, creates a personality for u that he falls in love with, and proceeds under that assumption. I worry about these guys bc idk how u get out of that. It’s obvious to me, as the recipient of the projection, but they don’t even know they’re doing it. They just think they found a girl they really like and she’s mysteriously not understanding the obvious connection
+
+serve Markdown: https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/commit/79ded21772a9aa338158c16a19dd4dad5a8f3d6b
double slashes in rendered source?!
social media share card https://dev.to/mishmanners/how-to-add-a-social-media-share-card-to-any-website-ha8
relative URLs = False (but not broken)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff