Scott Alexander has written about how [concept-shaped holes can be impossible to notice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/). A culture whose [civic religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) celebrates being trans, and denies that gender has truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, has concept-shaped holes that make it hard to notice the hypothesis "I'm having a systematically worse childhood than I otherwise would have because all the grown-ups in my life have agreed I was a girl since I was three years old, even though all of my actual traits are sampled from the joint distribution of juvenile male humans, not juvenile female humans", even if it's true.
-... anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occured to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and not a professional scientist. (And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who was "actually trans", whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.)
+... anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occured to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and I haven't studied child development. (And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who was "actually trans", whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.)
For some reason, it seemed really important that I draft a Document about it with lots of citations to send to a few friends. If I get around to it, I might clean it up and publish it as a blog post (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin; and, Harms from Misleading Training Data").
far editing tier—
+_ footnote on "no one would even consider"
_ post-Christmas conversation should do a better job of capturing the war, that Jessica thinks Scott is Bad for being a psychiatrist
_ conversation with Scott should include the point where I'm trying to do AI theory
_ Anna "everyone knows" we don't have free speech 2 Mar 2019, self-centeredness about which global goods matter
Scott said it sounded like I wasn't a 100% category absolutist, and that I would be willing to let a few tiny things through, and that our real difference is that he thought this gender thing was tiny enough to ignore, and I didn't. I thought his self-report of "tiny enough to ignore" was blatantly false: I predicted that his brain notices when trans women don't pass, and that this affected his probabilistic anticipations about them, decisions towards them, _&c._, and that when he finds out that a passing trans women is trans, then also affects his probabilistic anticipations, _&c._ This could be consistent with "tiny enough to ignore" if you draw the category boundaries of "tiny" and "ignore" the right way in order to force the sentence to come out "true" ... but you see the problem. If I took what Scott said in "... Not Man for the Categories" literally, I could make _any_ sentence true by driving a truck through the noncentral fallacy.
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1362514650089156608
+> Hypothesis: People to whom self-awareness and introspection come naturally, put way too much moral exculpatory weight on "But what if they don't know they're lying?" They don't know a lot of their internals! And don't want to know! That's just how they roll.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff