+Write the whole thing, then ask team if I should cut the backstory or split into its own post
-Actually—maybe I _do_ want to keep this narrowly scoped to the Category War, where I have a very strong case, rather than telling my whole gender/rationalism story!
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-OUTLINE
-* I haven't been doing so well, and I need to tell the story for my own sanity
-* I spent my entire adult life in "rationality", and I actually believed
+POINTS TO HIT
* In 2016, it was a huge shock to realize that I could be trans, too (I thought AGP was a different thing), and making this less confusing for other people seemed in line with the rationality mission
* slowly waking up from sex-differences denialim through LessWrong: "Changing Emotions", "Failed Utopia #4-2"
* It was pretty traumatizing when it turned out not to be!
* mandatory obfuscation (Anne Vitale syndrome)
* if part of the resistacne to an honest cost/benefit analysis is
* my vocbaulary is trained on this cult
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* reasonable vs. unreasonable misunderstandings
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* what did I expect, taking on an egregore so much bigger than me?
* if I agree that people should be allowed to transition, why am I freaking out? Because I _actually care about getting the theory correct_
* culture matters: if you're surrounded by crazy people
* it's not particular to social justice; I'd punch right in a Christian theocracy
* what I mean by "gaslighting"
-person paper on purity
+person paper on purity https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
"The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud."
-Sara Bareilles song
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-So, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular little intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts on an ideal of _absolute truthseeking_.
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-[briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it]
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-[briefly tell the story of my AGP and sex-differences denialism, seems causually realted; didn't expect to blog about it; provide the necessary backstory while being reasonably brief]
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-[my Facebook tantrum kept getting derailed]
+ [my Facebook tantrum kept getting derailed]
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-, to forge and refine a new mental martial art of _systematically correct reasoning_ that we were going to use to optimize ourselves and the world.
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-(Oh, and there was also this part about how the uniquely best thing for non-math-geniuses to do with their lives was to earn lots of money and donate it to our founder's nonprofit dedicated to building a recursively self-improving artificial superintelligence to take over the world in order to save our entire future light cone from the coming robot apocalypse. That part's complicated.)
-
-I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
+to forge and refine a new mental martial art of _systematically correct reasoning_ that we were going to use to optimize ourselves and the world.
And so when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley) in 2016, met a lot of trans women in real life for the first time, and did some more reading that convinced me of the at-least-approximate-correctness of the homosexual/autogynephilic two-types theory of MtF transgenderism that I had previously assumed was false (while being privately grateful that [there was a _word_ for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)) because everyone _said_ it was false
-
-rebrand—or, failing that, disband—or, failing that, be destroyed.
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(As usual, no one cares about trans men.)
We're all about, like, science and rationality and stuff, right? And so if there's a theory that's been sitting in the psychology literature for twenty years, that looks _correct_ (or at least, ah, [less wrong](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TitleDrop) than the mainstream view), that's _directly_ relevant to a _lot_ of people around here, that seems like the sort of thing
I confess that I _may have [overreacted](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [somewhat](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)_ when people weren't converging (or [even engaging](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/)) with me on the two-types/autogynephilia thing. Psychology is a genuinely difficult empirical science
-I would _never_ write someone off for disagreeing with me about a complicated empirical thing, because complicated empirical things are complicated enough that I have to [take the Outside View seriously](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html): no matter how "obvious" I think my view is, I might still be wrong for real in real life. So, while I was pretty upset for my own idiosyncratic personal reasons, it wasn't cause to _give up entirely on the dream of a rationality community_.
+I would _never_ write someone off for disagreeing with me about a complicated empirical thing, because complicated empirical things are complicated enough that I have to [take the Outside View seriously](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/beware-the-insi.html): no matter how "obvious" I think my view is, I might still be wrong for real in real life. So, while I was pretty upset for my own idiosyncratic personal reasons, it wasn't cause to _give up entirely on the dream of a systematically-correct-reasoning community_.
A.T. and R.B.'s Facebook comments
this is _really basic shit_
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The way this is supposed to work is that you just make your arguments and trust that good arguments will outcompete bad ones; emailing people begging for a clarification is kind of rude and I want to acknowledge the frame in which I'm the bad guy (or pitably mentally ill)—but I was taught that arguing with people when they're doing something wrong is actually doing them a _favor_—I was taught that it's virtuous to make an extraordinary effort
bad-faith nitpicker—I would be annoyed if someone repeatedly begged me to correct a mistake I made in a blog post from five years ago or a Tweet from November
I wouldn't hold anyone to standards I wouldn't myself—for whatever that's worth http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2018/07/object-vs-meta-golden-rule/
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analogy to school
(["_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic. _If the world were at stake_. _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening_."](http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good))
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-"One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to this effect. Telling someone, "I define the word 'wiggin' to mean a person with green eyes and black hair", by Gricean implication, asserts that the word "wiggin" will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages.
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-If green-eyes and black hair have no greater than default probability to be found together, nor does any other property occur at greater than default probability along with them, then the word "wiggin" is a lie: The word claims that certain people are worth distinguishing as a group, but they're not.
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-In this case the word "wiggin" does not help describe reality more compactly—it is not defined by someone sending the shortest message—it has no role in the simplest explanation. Equivalently, the word "wiggin" will be of no help to you in doing any Bayesian inference. Even if you do not call the word a lie, it is surely an error." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
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selection effect whereby citizens of the Caliphate only petition the rightful caliph when they have a problem, which can be discouraging when you're the caliph and you don't see the people's appreciation for the ways in which the kingdom is great
From my perspective, Professor, I'm just doing what you taught me (carve reality at the joints; speak the truth, even if your voice trembles; make an extraordinary effort when you've got Something to Protect; _&c._)
power is weird: I feel a bit icky when I notice Sophia or Rachel or Tetra changing their description in a way that seemed influenced by me
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"audience capture" https://forward.com/opinion/431400/youtuber-pewdiepies-adl-boycott-shows-how-anti-semitism-goes-mainstream/
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https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/15/my-id-on-defensiveness/
rhetorical superweapon: https://archive.is/6WGbk
+Say it's comin' soon,
+Someday without you
+All I can do, is get me past the ghost of you
+Wave goodbye to me
+I won't say I'm sorry
+I'll be alright, once I find the other side of
+
"If I'm aching at the thought of them, what for? That's not me anymore."
"And I'm not the girl that I intend to be."
TWAW is a positive-valence instance of the worst-argument-in-the-world, but it's still the SAME THING; if you can't see that, you're dumb
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[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking)
I just don't _know how_ to tell the true tale of personal heartbreak without expressing some degree of disappointment in some people's characters. It is written that ["almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken."](https://blog.jaibot.com/). And [the _first_ step](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-on-proposing-solutions) towards fixing that which is broken, is _describing the problem_.)
If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.
-stroop test
+stroop test https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
the extent to which I _anticipated_ needing to appeal to personal authority, is indicative of me already not believing in guided-by-the-beauty
https://rationalconspiracy.com/2017/01/03/four-layers-of-intellectual-conversation/
-whether it's too late for the pebbles to vote https://status451.com/2016/08/10/too-late-for-the-pebbles-to-vote-part-2/
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A world that makes sense. A world that's not lying to me.
_(But this time not for you, but just for me—)_
_(If I'm aching at the thought of you, what for? That's not me anymore)_
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The "truth/anti-truth attractors in human psychology" hypothesis feels more plausible when I emphasize the need to cover-up cover-ups as the specific mechanism for anti-truth.
Introspectively, I think I can almost feel the oscillation between "I'm embarrassed and upset about {thing} that I don't want to acknowledge or explain, but that makes me not want to acknowledge or explain the fact that I feel embarrassed an upset" vs. "Yes, {thing} is real; real things are allowed to appear on maps."
Ultimately, I think this is a pedagogy decision that Eliezer got right. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say that "it's subjective so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking a useful discussion about the exact, precise ways that specific, definite things are, in fact, relative to other specific, definite things.
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Great at free speech norms, there's a level above free speech where you _converge on the right answer
(I cried my tears for three good years; you can't be mad at me.)
_politically load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
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https://economicsofgender.tumblr.com/post/188438604772/i-vaguely-remember-learning-trans-women-are : "for a while nobody argued about the truth or implications of 'trans women are women.' It would be like arguing over whether, in fact, the birthday boy really gets the first piece of cake."
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So, while I have been seeking out a coalition/bandwagon/flag-rally for the past few weeks, I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts, the different definitions imply different probabilistic inferences, so banning one definition as hurtful is an epistemic issue that rationalists should notice because it makes it artificially more expensive to express probabilistic inferences that can be expressed concisely with that definition."
I do usually mention the two-types model at the same time because that's where I think the truth is and it's hard to see the Bayes-structure-of-language problem without concrete examples. (Why is it that that only ~3% of women-who-happen-to-be-cis identify as lesbians, but 60% of women-who-happen-to-be-trans do? If you're careful, you can probably find a way to encode the true explanation in a way that doesn't offend anyone. But if you want to be able to point to the truth concisely—in a way that fits in a Tweet, or to an audience that doesn't know probabilistic graphical models—then "Because trans women are men" needs to be sayable. You don't need to say it when it's not relevant or if a non-rationalist who might be hurt by it is in the room, but it can't be unsayable.)
I don't want to fall into the bravery-debate trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
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Strongly agree with this. I have some misgivings about the redpilly coalition-seeking I've been doing recently. My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.
"Moshe": "People rightly distrust disclaimers and nearly no one except me & Michael can say so instead of acting like it’s common knowledge with people who don’t fully know this."
_Why_ is it humorous? Because you don't like sports? (["Though, since you never designed your own leg muscles, you are racing using strength that isn't yours. A race between robot cars is a purer contest of their designers."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge))
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https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067300728572600320
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1065666629155995648 "The only leaders in the current ecosystem who express any kind of controversial opinion, ever, are organisms that specialize in subsisting on the resource flows produced by expressing that kind of controversial opinion."
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/12/what-is-rationalist-berkleys-community-culture/
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/the-craft-is-not-the-community/
+I feel betrayed, but that doesn't
+
+"chromosomes" isn't as dumb as it sounds—it's the "root" of the causal net of all other sex differences
+
+Am I suffering from a "hostile media" effect?
+
+Choose a gerrymandered or thin-subspace category isn't that dangerous in itself—it's the dark-side epistemology that kills everyone
+deconfusion https://intelligence.org/2018/11/22/2018-update-our-new-research-directions/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff