1 Title: Backlog Metablogging, April 2022
6 I feel like I've been pretty lazy for the last—ten months? A laziness born out of resignation and despair, [a sense that I've outlived myself](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/#__sec3title), that my story and my world is over, and I'm just enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife in—[the time we have left](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy). I may have picked up a slight gaming habit (to the tune of 275 hours of [_Slay the Spire_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slay_the_Spire) and 660 games of [_Super Auto Pets_](https://teamwoodgames.com/)).
8 But it's not, _over_. While the world is still here, I still have things to fight for besides my reasonable comfort—and still [(somehow yet still)](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/) so much more yet unwritten! If my grandchildren won't read it (because I'm not even on a trajectory to have children, or because the world isn't on a trajectory to last that long), [the next-next generation of language models will](https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556).
10 In December 2018, I [put up a teaser list of post ideas I hadn't then gotten around to writing up yet](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/). To remind myself—and you—that I'm still alive, maybe it's a good time to review how that went so far, and post a new list.
12 Ideas from the December 2018 list that got published/finished in some form—
14 * the last part of my planned reply to [Ozy's reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [Scott Alexander](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) got finished in December 2019 as ["Reply to Ozymandias on Fully Consensual Gender"](/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/)
15 * the overlap-along-one-dimension-does-not-imply-overlap-in-the-entire-configuration-space thing got briefly [covered on _Less Wrong_ as "The Univariate Fallacy"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy) in June 2019
16 * the point about how [regression to the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean) unfortunately undermines the standard "But group differences to apply to individuals" moral got [covered as part of the coda to my April 2020 [review of the new Charles Murray book](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#everyday-base-rates)
17 * the thing about minimalist "activism" focused on giving people more accurate information rather than lobbying for particular object-level decisions got mostly covered in September 2021's ["I Don't Do Policy"](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)
18 * what my autogynephilic fantasy life looks like in detail got covered in May 2021's ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)
20 Ideas remaining from the December 2018 list that I still care about—
22 * "'But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means': Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology"
23 * If (_e.g._) the 5% most masculine/androgynous females identify as NB to escape the strictures of the "woman" gender role, that increases the gender-role pressure on females who don't identify as NB (who are now presumed to consent to it)
24 * something of my own take on what's going on with the etiology of MtF (more than just punting to [Brown](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/) or [Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) as my standard reference for the background worldview that my content takes for granted)
25 * I especially owe this to friend of the blog [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/) who has become disillustioned with orthodox "Blanchardianism", and having been trapped in a ten-month laziness spiral of resignation and despair that my story and my world are over isn't an excuse while the world is, in fact, still here
26 * the epistemic-horror short stories!!
28 Ideas from the December 2018 list that I'm [less excited about now and am less likely to finish](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/01/ideas-have-expirations/)—
30 * naïve Bayes models for sex categorization
31 * Codes of Conduct as an ideological enforcement mechanism
32 * "The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition"
33 * [FaceApp](https://faceapp.com/)/[Oculus Go](https://www.oculus.com/go/) product reviews
35 Book reviews I'm relatively unlikely to get around to finishing—
37 * joint book review of Kathleen Stock's _Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism_ and Kathryn Paige Harden's _The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality_
38 * the subtitle parallelism is charming, and the heroic willingness to face facts that are inconvenient to one's value-commitments while staying true to those values is _on theme_ for this blog
39 * Imogen Binnie's [_Nevada_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_(Binnie_novel))
40 * something about the horror of a world without ambition or the life of the mind (or specifically, the philosopher–scientist's mind, rather than the activist's)? Binnie (who will always have more readers than me) writes characters don't have any concept of _doing_ anything except drugs and complaining about Society's transphobia.
41 * Abigail Shrier's _Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters_
42 * _Damage_ is sensationalist right-wing journalism, rather than the kind of careful, nuanced scholarship of the kind you would expect to be reviewed by such a refined blog as _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_—but damned if the situation on the ground doesn't call more sensationalist right-wing journalism
43 * Multi-Book Review: Various Sex-Ed Books for Children
44 * comparing and contrasting mainstream (for now) selections ([_What's the Big Secret? Talk about Sex with Girls and Boys_](https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Big-Secret-Talking-about/dp/0316101834), [_Amazing You! Getting Smart About Your Private Parts_](https://www.amazon.com/Amazing-You-Getting-Smart-Private/dp/0142410586), and [_It's Not the Stork! A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends_](https://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-Stork-Families-Friends/dp/0763633313)), to a genderist alternative ([_Who Are You? The Kid's Guide to Gender Identity_](https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-You-Gender-Identity/dp/1785927280)) and a Christian alternative ([the _God's Design for Sex_ series](https://www.amazon.com/Full-Set-Design-Revised-Paperback/dp/B00O5DIVTU))
45 * The ideological books are what you would expect and impossible to parody, but I would be [more comfortable reading the Christian book](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) to a child, because at least it explains the facts ("I have a penis. That makes me a boy like Daddy") in the course of attributing everything to God, whereas _Who Are You?_ is trying to set up [a world where facts aren't a thing](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) ("Babies can't talk, so grown-ups make a guess by looking at their bodies").
46 * You can also see a propaganda gradient in the mainstream books over time. _What's the Big Secret?_ (1997) acknowledges sex stereotypes as having a grain of truth, but is firm about them not being normative or definitive ("Girls and boys do play in different ways. Sometimes, but not always"), whereas _It's Not the Stork_ (2006) bizarrely tries to rebut psychological-sex-difference claims without even acknowledging what they claims are ("Girls catch fish and worms and bugs!" "So do boys!") and has more racially diverse illustrations.
48 New list of more ideas I want to finish—
50 * the Whole Dumb Story of my breakup with the so-called "rationalist" community (working title: "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning")
51 * This has been brewing for a couple years. (["I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life,"](/2020/Aug/memento-mori/) I said in August 2020.) I have thousands of words of drafting and notes. (["Sexual Dimorphism"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) was actually Part One of this, published separately as a mere megapost when I found I didn't have the stamina to tell the Whole Dumb Story in a single mega-megapost.) It's just been hard, but—it's over, isn't it? Why can't I move on?
52 * book review of [the _new_ new Charles Murray book](https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/inconvenient-truths/) that's _actually_ about the thing that everyone assumes all of his previous books were about
53 * with a coda about how the thing itself is much less important than how [the political necessity of denying the thing](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#schelling-point-for-preventing-group-conflicts) [ends up](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies) [recursively](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) _destroying our Society's ability to reason_ ...
54 * with potentially _astronomical_ consequences, as a Society that managed to successfully do eugenic selection for intelligence [_before_](https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/) developing computing would have a much better shot at solving [the artificial intelligence alignment problem](https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/mzgtmmTKKn5MuCzFJ) ...
55 * in contrast to how in _our_ Society, people can't even _talk_ about this stuff except under cover of a pseudonym! We are dead! We are so dead!!
56 * speculative but deeply-researched post arguing that some young children who are identified as transgender in the current ideological environment, would likely not have had gender problems at all in a different environment (working title: "Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data")
57 * I owe Tracing Woodgrains a linkpost-with-commentary to his [nice essay about me](https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/si7k2c/on_transitions_freedom_of_form_and_the_righteous/)
58 * speculations about my ["medianworld"](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1619639#reply-1619639) (a worldbuilding exercise from the [Glowfic](https://www.glowfic.com/) community, where you try to portray a realistic, consilient world in which the average person is like you)
59 * a reply to Scott Alexander's ["Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/)
60 * I have a few thousand words drafted, but I haven't been happy with it, because it's surprisingly hard to explain my point of view in a way that I think will land for people who don't already share my parsimony intuitions; here as with [Moser 2009](/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf), I'm not doubting the survey data itself; rather, I think we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that in this case a Yes answer to the same survey question doesn't mean the same thing for both populations
61 * actually, I want to explore the point about regression to the mean and group differences in _more mathematical detail_, because there's more philosophical depth here: regression is an empirically observable phenomenon, but there's _also_ a sense in which the choice of group is meaningfully subjective: do I regress the mean of my immediate family, or my extended family, or my race?
62 * a post about how redefining gender categories is the right thing to do insofar as many people transitioning changes statistical structure of data in the world (following Stuart Armstrong's ["Declustering, Reclustering, and Filling in Thingspace"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WikzbCsFjpLTRQmXn/declustering-reclustering-and-filling-in-thingspace))
63 * This is probably important to write up as a novel argument "supporting" the "pro-trans" coalition, in contrast to how more of my content tends to code as "anti-trans" when you orthogonally project into the one-dimensional space of the usual battle lines. The fact that I generate and publish [such](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/) [arguments](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) spontaneously is how you know—and how I know—that I'm not a _partisan hack_.
64 * a post about how sex concepts represent _both_ categorical differences _and_ the conjunction of statistical differences of various effect sizes, such that if you try to unpin the word from the categorical differences, you end up (as per the usual gender-critical complaint) defining gender in terms of stereotypes because there's nothing _left_ for the word to attach to (working title: "Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes")
65 * a post about how gender identity ideology is actually _not_ very compatible with the traditional liberal impulse to make gender less of a big deal, because there's a huge difference between omitting category information that's not relevant, _vs._ letting people choose their category-membership (working title: "Elision _vs_. Choice")
66 * a steelperson of the "assigned at birth" terminology (working title: "'Assigned at Birth' Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)")
67 * I occasionally get people telling me that [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) where AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, _without_ actually understanding the nature of the condiiton (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")
68 * a post about the motivation for positing peseudobisexuality or meta-attraction as part of the two-type taxonomy of MtF: it may _sound_ like a suspicious _ad hoc_ patch to save the theory from falsification by bi trans women, but it's actually needed to explain the commonality of (a) AGP males expressing attraction to men _only while in "girl mode" themselves_, and (b) self-reports of sexual orientation changing post-transition in trans women who weren't androphilic _before_
69 * (a) is suspicious is because "bi + AGP, independently" doesn't explain why the interest would be dependent on one's _own_ presentation; (b) is suspicious is because everything else we know about sexual orientation in males (but [not females](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf)) makes it look awfully _stable_. (Conversion therapy doesn't work; criminally convicted pedophiles still show genital response to child stimuli despite the huge incentives to conceal/repress it; [correlation of homosexuality with childhood behavior](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf) makes it look like a [prenatal organizational effect, rather than an activational effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational-Activational_Hypothesis) that would respond to HRT as an adult.)
70 * Maybe these two bullet points suffice and I don't need to pad it out into a whole post?
71 * a critique of the implicit [presentism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) in Holden Karnofsky's [_Cold Takes_](https://www.cold-takes.com/) blog
72 * For a blog that [aspires to see the world as if you were a billion years old](https://www.cold-takes.com/olden-the-imaginary-billion-year-old-version-of-me/), there's just something very _off_ about proclaiming with a straight face that ["one of our goals as a society should be to fight things—from sexism to disease—that have afflicted us for most of our history"](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/). Not that I'm pro-sexism—I grew up in the current era, too—but I think a little bit of self-awareness is in order about how our ancestors had a word for "disease" in their own language and knew why it was bad, whereas our concept of "sexism" is [about sixty years old](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sexism).
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