From e548bf88fd9ac36c9208f6ed49ef58e5cf21ed30 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 23:56:57 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] Saturday night despair MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit What's wrong with me? Why don't I want to write? But I need to finish the Whole Dumb Story before the world ends—I have to see it through! Will I remember tomorrow that I want to live? --- ...nd-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md | 2 ++ ...mation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md | 25 +++++++++++++++---- notes/wordcounts.txt | 10 +++++--- 3 files changed, 28 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md index 27f5cd9..50427c6 100644 --- a/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md +++ b/content/drafts/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer.md @@ -190,6 +190,8 @@ At first I was imagining a post on my existing blog, but a couple of my very sma ... the pseudonymity is kind of a joke at this point. It turned out that my need for openness and a unified identity was far stronger than my grasp of what my very smart and cowardly friends think is prudence, such that I ended up frequently linking to and claiming ownership of the blog from my real name, _and_ otherwise [leaking](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [entropy](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) [through](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/) a sieve on this side. Given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even _necessary_), it's _probably_ a smarter play if the _first_ page of my real-name Google search results isn't my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog?—so I _guess_ I'll keep the Saotome-Westlake byline on this site, even though it's definitely a mere differential-visibility market-segmentation pen name, like how everyone knows that Robert Galbraith is actually J. K. Rowling, and not an Actually Secret pen name. Plus, after having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there are _already_ a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I don't want to throw away or rewrite that history—this is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning. +[TODO: the Transgender Roadmap website mis-identified my pseudonym, so I guess it worked?!] + (Separately, I'm not entirely without misgivings about the exact naming choices I made, although I don't actively regret it, the way I regret [my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials). For the pen name: a hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from [a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD), "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is ["Somebody has to and no one else will"](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/). For the blog name: I had already imagined that if I ever did stoop to the depravity of starting one of my own one of those [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), I would call it _The Titillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, and in fact had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a captioning contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html), but since this was to be a serious autogynephilia _science_ blog, rather than tawdry _object-level_ autogynephilia blogging, I picked "Scintillating" as a more wholesome adjective. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to choose a URL different from the blog's title—people seem to remember the URL more than the title, and as far as the URL goes, to be led by the dot before the TLD to interpret "space" as a separate word, rather than my intent of "genderspace" being analogous to "configuration space"—but it doesn't bother me that much.) Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware? diff --git a/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md b/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md index 38b6ef3..ce43feb 100644 --- a/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md +++ b/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md @@ -48,24 +48,31 @@ Second—second is hard to quickly explain if you're not already familiar with t Third—various cultural factors. You can't be trans if your culture doesn't have a concept of "being trans", and the concepts [and incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) that your culture offers, make a difference as to how you turn out. People who think of themselves as trans women in today's culture, could very well be "the same" as people who thought of themselves as drag queens or occasional cross-dressers 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. (Either "the same" in terms of underlying dispositions, or, in many cases, just literally the same people.) -If there are multiple non-mutually-exclusive reasons why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone, then the decision of whether to transition could take the form of a liability–threshold model: males transition if the _sum_ of their femininity, autogynephilia, and culture-related-trans-disposition exceed some threshold. +If there are multiple non-mutually-exclusive reasons why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone, then the decision of whether to transition could take the form of a liability–threshold model: males transition if the _sum_ of their levels of femininity, autogynephilia, and culture-related-trans-disposition exceed some threshold (given some sensible scheme for quantifying and adding (!) these traits). -So where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete Bayesian network, there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm conjecturing that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) can also be approximated a two-cluster model: _most_ people high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and _vice versa_, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types". +You might ask: okay, but then where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete Bayesian network, there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm conjecturing that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) could also be approximated a two-cluster model: _most_ people high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and _vice versa_, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types". + +[TODO— [The sexual orientation node increases femininity and decreases AGP, so those pathways are anti-correlated; however, the fact that straight AGP men also vary somewhat in their degree of femininity; some informal accounts (link Sailer) have emphasized how masculine (even hypermasculine) AGPs are, but this seems wrong] [briefly mention ETLE] [Berkson's paradox is also a thing] [People who don't quite seem to fit the coarse taxonomy might still be explained by the graph and a threshold model] +] + + +You might ask: okay, but hhy do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is _true_? -Why do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is _true_? Ultimately, the reader cannot abdicate responsibility to think it through and decide for herself, but it seems to _me_ that all six arrows in the graph are things that we separately have a pretty large weight of evidence for, either in published scientific studies, or just informally looking at the world. +Ultimately, the reader cannot abdicate responsibility to think it through and decide for herself ... but it seems to _me_ that all six arrows in the graph are things that we separately have a pretty large weight of evidence for, either in published scientific studies, or just informally looking at the world. -[femininity->transition would be obvious even if it weren't in th] +The femininity→transition arrow is obvious. The sexual orientation→femininity arrow (representing the fact that gay men are more feminine than straight men), besides being stereotypical folk knowledge, has also been extensively documented, for example by [Lippa](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) and by [Bailey and Zucker](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf). -[Sexual orientation effect on femininity documented by Lippa and Bailey-Zucker] +The v-structure between [ETLE sexual orientation AGP v-structure, and effect of AGP on transition documented by Lawrence] [I don't have a good formal citation on cultural factors, but it seems really obvious if you've been paying attention for the last decade] +] [quantifying the two-type effect: Lippa 2000 "Gender-Related Traits in [...]" @@ -77,6 +84,14 @@ gay men are at .48 (.14); straight women at .36 (.13); straight men at .68 (.12) that's d=–1.61 between gay and straight men a gay man only needs to be 1 standard deviation (.48-.36 = 0.12) more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight women whereas a straight man needs to be (.68-.36 = 0.32) 0.32/0.12=2.67 more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight woman—that's rarer, but not impossible + +In percentile terms, 1-norm.cdf(1) = 0.15 of gay men are as feminine as a woman +whereas 1-norm.cdf(2.67) = 0.003 of straight men are +that's a likelihood ratio of 50 ... but the prior is not that far from 50:1 in the other direction! They cancel out!! + +For concreteness: what does the Bayes net spit out if 3% of men are gay, and 5% are AGP, and whatever other assumptions I need to make this work? +Suppose gays transition if they're 2-sigma feminine ... + ] [further implications: as cultural factors increase, the late-onset type becomes more of a "NOS" rather than AGP type] diff --git a/notes/wordcounts.txt b/notes/wordcounts.txt index 05c04a3..1050a2b 100644 --- a/notes/wordcounts.txt +++ b/notes/wordcounts.txt @@ -9,21 +9,23 @@ wc -w 2022/* 2021/* 2020/* 2019/* 2018/* 2017/* 2016/* | sort -n -s -k1,1 1521 2018/blame-me-for-trying.md 1584 2020/crossing-the-line.md 1704 2019/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason.md - 1732 2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md + 1733 2022/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md 1910 2021/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic.md 1927 2017/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision.md 1968 2016/joined.md 1977 2018/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes.md 2059 2020/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness.md 2067 2018/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018.md + 2107 2022/backlog-metablogging-april-2022.md 2144 2019/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender.md 2774 2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md + 3682 2022/comment-on-a-scene-from-planecrash-crisis-of-faith.md 3760 2018/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females.md 6523 2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md 11013 2020/book-review-human-diversity.md - 12010 2022/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md - 15733 2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md -115996 total + 12011 2022/challenges-to-yudkowskys-pronoun-reform-proposal.md + 15735 2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md +123216 total 1491 algorithms_of_deception.md -- 2.17.1