ready ... (Presidential anxiety edition)

How do I get so lost in a Twitter gutter? I really want to finish
this! And I was supposed to do some dayjob work even though it's
President's Day. Well ... 1730 to 2130 is four hours. You can do a lot
in four hours, if you actually try. Let's try! Let's prove it's
possible to try!

diff --git a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
index 86197d9..dd7113e 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
+++ b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
@@ -634,6 +634,8 @@ In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i
 
 This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
 
+[TODO: ↑ less aggressive about E.Y.'s motives, just focus on consequences for people like me who trust him]
+
 If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_. 
 
 In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
@@ -652,7 +654,7 @@ In ["The Ideology Is Not the Movement"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/th
 
 Alexander jokingly identifies the identifying feature of our robot cult as being the belief that "Eliezer Yudkowsky is the rightful caliph": the Sequences were a rallying flag that brought together a lot of like-minded people to form a subculture with its own ethos and norms—among which Alexander includes "don't misgender trans people"—but the subculture emerged as its own entity that isn't necessarily _about_ anything outside itself.
 
-No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement is actually a _declaration of failure_.
+No one seemed to notice at the time, but this characterization of our movement is actually a _declaration of failure_. 
 
 
 Hence, "robot cult."

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index 45f54a4..3e88984 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -2398,3 +2398,5 @@ https://gcacademianetwork.weebly.com/
 https://patch.com/illinois/evanston/northwestern-neuroscientist-found-dead-after-racism-allegations
 
 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-take-the-penis-off-its-pedestal/
+
+AGP testimony https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDE9H8i2Vw0