>
> —Sara Barellies, ["Gonna Get Over You"](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics)
-I haven't been doing so well for a lot of the last ... um, fifteen-ish months? I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has probably been a below-average year even by my standards, with hours of lost sleep, occasional crying bouts, _many, many_ hours of obsessive ruminating-while-pacing instead of doing my dayjob, and too long [with](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF18bz2j5PM) [a](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hny1prRDE3I) [Sara](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) [Barellies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) [song](https://youtu.be/jZMQ0OKVO80?t=112) [on](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqamOOSdeHs) loop to numb the pain.[^breakup] I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
+I haven't been doing so well for a lot of the last ... um, fifteen-ish months? [TODO: make it less time-critical] I mean, I've always been a high-neuroticism person, but this has probably been a below-average year even by my standards, with hours of lost sleep, occasional crying bouts, _many, many_ hours of obsessive ruminating-while-pacing instead of doing my dayjob, and too long [with](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF18bz2j5PM) [a](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hny1prRDE3I) [Sara](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUe3oVlxLSA) [Barellies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdVSVoCLmg) [song](https://youtu.be/jZMQ0OKVO80?t=112) [on](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqamOOSdeHs) loop to numb the pain.[^breakup] I've been reluctant to write about it in too much detail for poorly-understood psychological reasons. Maybe it would feel too much like attacking my friends?
[^breakup]: I'm proud of my choice of breakup songs. My breakup song with institutionalized schooling was Taylor Swift's ["We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA4iX5D9Z64), a bitter renunciation of an on-again-off-again relationship ("I remember when we broke up / The first time") with a ex who was distant and condescending ("And you, would hide away and find your peace of mind / With some indie record that's much cooler than mine"), thematically reminiscent of my ultimately degree-less string of [bad](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/07/trying-to-buy-a-lamp/) [relationships](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/draft-of-a-letter-to-a-former-teacher-which-i-did-not-send-because-doing-so-would-be-a-bad-idea/) [with](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/12/a-philosophy-of-education/) [UC Santa Cruz](https://www.ucsc.edu/) (2006–2007), [Heald College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) (2008), [Diablo Valley College](https://www.dvc.edu/) (2010–2012), and [San Francisco State University](https://www.sfsu.edu/) (2012–2013).
Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
-The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about.
+The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about in Berkeley 2020.
I can be polite in most circumstances, as the price of keeping the peace in Society. But it is a price, a cost—and it's a _cognitive_ cost, the cost of _destroying information_ that would make people uncomfortable. Systematically correct reasoners needn't _mention_ the cost in most circumstances (that would not be polite), but we should at least be able to refrain from indulging in clever [not-technically-lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying) sophistry that tries to _make it look like there's no cost_.
the Church
-won't you be embarrassed to leave if we create utopia
-
won't all those trans women be embarrassed after the singularity
we live in a world where reason doesn't work
_not_ gaslight me about the most important thing in my life?
-I don't think I'm setting my price for joining particularly high here?
-
There could be similarly egregious errors that I'm not as sensitive too
I don't think you can build an aligned superintelligence from a culture this crazy
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[...]
MASSIVE cognitive dissonance, "What? What???"
[^face]: Vicki Bruce, A. Mike Burton, _et al._, ["Sex discrimination: how do we tell the difference between male and female faces?"](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), _Perception_, Vol 22, Issue 2 (1993)
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-[Insert this after first mention of Great Teacher/Popular Author]
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[happy price, symmetry-breaking]
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
-> And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
+> And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say "Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong" and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
Have to?!
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-In sexually-reproducing species, [complex functional adaptations in are necessarily species-universal _up to sex_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind), because adaptations have to evolve incrementally: you don't have selection pressure for an allele for a ever-so-slightly-improved eye, until all the pieces for the unimproved eye are already at fixation and won't get immediately [reshuffled during meiosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_crossover) in the next generation.
+In sexually-reproducing species, [complex functional adaptations in are necessarily species-universal _up to sex_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind), because adaptations have to evolve incrementally: you don't have selection pressure for an allele for a ever-so-slightly-improved kidney, until all the pieces for the unimproved kidney are already at fixation and won't get immediately [reshuffled during meiosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_crossover) in the next generation.
(That is: evolutionary psychology is impressively anti-racist, but _super_ sexist.)
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[leaning on "Travis" for social proof]
+[the _astonishing_ regularity in which people will privately agree with my philosophy, but diss my coalition]
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-[the _astonishing_ regularity in which people will privately agree with my philosophy, but diss my coalition]
+This post has been incredibly emotionally difficult to write, because intellectual discourse _shouldn't_ be personal _or_ political. It's easy to write posts of the form, "Smith argues that X, but actually, not-X, because ..." and it doesn't hurt because it's not about Smith or the social pressures acting on her, it's about the balance of evidence and structure of the arguments for and against X. It's only when argument _fails_ and yet you [still have Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/), that your last recourse is to jump to the meta level and say,
+
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+
+[Dark Side Epistemology]
\ No newline at end of file
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/eh0wz9/tim_at_my_gym_has_terrible_etiquette_in_the/
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/ehy9td/transwomen_in_the_changeroom_my_experience_as_a/
+
+four studies using multivariate methodology in personality: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/sex-differences-in-personality-are-large-and-important.html
+
+["Fear not to touch the best / The truth shall be thy warrant"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/trb9HPWFk8Gy9MBdN/less-wrong-poetry-corner-walter-raleigh-s-the-lie)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff