I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the _specific_ things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality))
+I'm sure there are women with an analogous story to tell about the nature of their own uniqueness—analogous along _some_ dimensions, if not others—but it's not _my_ story to tell.
+
I can _imagine_ that all the gaps will vanish after the revolution. I can imagine it, but I can no longer _assert it with a straight face_ because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fantatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."
That's why defining your personal identity to get the answer you want is cheating. If the answer you wanted was actually _true_, you could just say so without needing to _want_ it.
-When [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends [said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was _more relevantly similar_ to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole strech of space time.
+When [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends [said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was _more relevantly similar_ to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole strech of spacetime.
Same principle when Yudkowsky wrote, "If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman [...] I don't think I'd call her 'me'". The claim is that psychological sex differences are large enough to violate the Lipschitz condition imposed by our _ordinary_ concept of personal identity. Maybe he was wrong, but if so, that cashes out as being wrong _about_ how similar women and men actually are (which in principle could be operationalized and precisely computed, even if _we_ don't know how to make it precise), _not_ whether we prefer the "call her me" or "don't call her me" conclusion and want to _retroactively redefine the meaning of the words in order to make the claim come out "true."_
-Do people ever really recover from being religious? I still endorse the underlying psychological motivation that makes me prefer the "call her me" conclusion, the _intention_ that made me think I could get away with defining it to be true. Now that I don't believe that anymore—now that I can't take for granted that actual women aren't a somewhat unfathomable Other onto me—my world hasn't collapsed in the way religious people [tend to fear](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) when their most precious belief is threatened. It just means I have to do [a little more intellectual work](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility) to figure out what's actually right. [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
+Do people ever really recover from being religious? I still endorse the underlying psychological motivation that makes me prefer the "call her me" conclusion, the _intention_ that made me think I could get away with defining it to be true. Now that I don't believe that anymore—
+
+[...]
+
+[People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
-----
--------
-While [the Sequence explaining Yudkowsky's metaethics](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/metaethics-sequence) was being published (which a lot of people, including me, didn't quite "get" at the time; a [later précis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zqwWicCLNBSA5Ssmn/by-which-it-may-be-judged) was perhaps more successful), I was put off by the extent to which Yudkowsky seemed to want to ground the specification of value in [the evolved design of the human brain](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSXZpvqpa9vbGGLtG/thou-art-godshatter), as if culturally-defined values were irrelevant, to be wiped away by [the extrapolation of what people _would_ want if they knew more, thought faster, _&c._](https://arbital.com/p/normative_extrapolated_volition/).
+While [the Sequence explaining Yudkowsky's metaethics](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/metaethics-sequence) was being published (which a lot of people, including me, didn't quite "get" at the time; I found a [later précis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zqwWicCLNBSA5Ssmn/by-which-it-may-be-judged) easier to understand), I was put off by the extent to which Yudkowsky seemed to want to ground the specification of value in [the evolved design of the human brain](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSXZpvqpa9vbGGLtG/thou-art-godshatter), as if culturally-defined values were irrelevant, to be wiped away by [the extrapolation of what people _would_ want if they knew more, thought faster, _&c._](https://arbital.com/p/normative_extrapolated_volition/).
-And the _reason_ I felt that way was because I was aware of how much of a historical anomaly my sacred ideological value of antisexism was. Contrast to Yudkowsky's [casual sex-realist speculation in the comment section](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement/comment/vHNejGa6cRxh6kdnE):
+And the _reason_ I felt that way was because I was aware of how much of a historical anomaly my sacred ideological value of antisexism was. Contrast to Yudkowsky's [casually "sexist" speculation in the comment section](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement/comment/vHNejGa6cRxh6kdnE):
> If there are distinct categories of human transpersonal values, I would expect them to look like "male and female babies", "male children", "male adults", "female children", "female adults", "neurological damage 1", "neurological damage 2", not "Muslims vs. Christians!"
Looking back—I do think I had a point that culturally-inculcated values won't completely wash out under extrapolation, but I think I was vastly underestimating the extent to which your current sacred ideology _can_ be shown to be meaningfully "wrong" with better information—and, by design of the extrapolation procedure, this _shouldn't_ be threatening.
+Your morality doesn't have to converge with that of your genetic twin who was raised in a culture with a different ideology/religion—maybe culturally learned values from childhood get "frozen" after reasoning ability kicks in, such that I would never see eye-to-eye with my genetic analogue who was raised with (say) a traditional Muslim view of relations between the sexes, no matter how much we debates and no matter how many new facts we learned.
+At the same time, while reflecting on one's own values and how to refine them in response to new information new situations, the question of what your genetic analogue raised in a different culture would think is _relevant_ information.
+["Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a[n ideology] discovers a sense of beauty in it."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession)
-Suppose it _is_ true that female adults and male adults have distinct transpersonal values. At the time, I found the prospect horrifying—but that just shows that the design of male transpersonal values _contains within it_ the potential (under appropriate cultural conditions) to be horrified by sex differences in transpersonal values.
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility
+[...]
-The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).
-If, naïvely, [I don't _want_ it to be the case that women are a different thing that I don't understand](/2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/), but that preference _itself_ arises out of
+When I introspect on the _causes_ of my gender problems, I see three parents in the causal graph: autogynephilia, being a sensitive boy rather than a macho guy, and my committment to antisexist ideology (wanting to treat feminism as a religion, as a special case of egalitarianism as our state religion).
+[...]
-------
+If I want to be aligned with women in the sense of AI alignment, and genuinely do right by them, how to accomplish that _depends on_ the actual facts of the matter about sex differences and similarities.
+[...]
-When I introspect on the _causes_ of my gender problems, I see three parents in the causal graph: autogynephilia, being a sensitive boy rather than a macho guy, and my committment to antisexist ideology (wanting to treat feminism as a religion, as a special case of egalitarianism as our state religion).
+(During the vicissitudes of [my 2017 psychotic episode](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), [I wrote a note](/images/cooperate_note.jpg): "cooperate with men who cooperate with women [who] cooperate with men who cooperate with women who cooperate with men".)
--------
+[...]
-If I want to be aligned with women in the sense of AI alignment, and genuinely do right by them, how to accomplish that _depends on_ the actual facts of the matter about sex differences and similarities.
+Suppose it _is_ true that female adults and male adults have distinct transpersonal values. At the time, I found the prospect horrifying—but that just shows that the design of male transpersonal values _contains within it_ the potential (under appropriate cultural conditions) to be horrified by sex differences in transpersonal values.
------
+If, naïvely, [I don't _want_ it to be the case that women are a different thing that I don't understand](/2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/), but that preference _itself_ arises out of [...]
-(During the vicissitudes of [my 2017 psychotic episode](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), [I wrote a note](/images/cooperate_note.jpg): "cooperate with men who cooperate with women [who] cooperate with men who cooperate with women who cooperate with men".)
+The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).
+
+-------
+
+Diary: never do drag
--------
Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body". Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/yTdJm7JjPJPynwS3a
-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."
+
+
+, something you should be able to ["consider [...] open-mindedly and then steal only the good parts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YicoiQurNBxSp7a65/is-clickbait-destroying-our-general-intelligence).
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