check in

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / notes.txt

I don't think we're in equilibrium; I don't think everyone knows what's going on


fragments—

O Wad Some Power the Giftie Gie Us; Or, the Identity Dysphoria Trap (school dysphoria)

Reuknighted (C. being really curious about my hair "It's complicated." "I think it sets me apart from other guys." Were we ever really living in the same world?)

reanalysis of Lawrence data!!!

Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies (Transgender Edition)
(Eugenics Is Really Important, You Delusional Bastards)
The Aristocrats
Yalta (https://transblog.grieve-smith.com/the-essential-conflict/ "What's in it for me?" "You're the one who doesn't believe in personal identity—you should be happy for us")
Fertility
Externalize Everything
"I Will Fight for the Place Where I'm Free"; Or, Stop Praising Steven Universe for LGBT Representation
Worlds Collide

El Goonish Shive  (http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2328 http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1895)

Choir

It's actually HELPFUL when friends point out an insonsistency between my self-report and my behavior. Ben asked, "Do you care about that?" And I said, "No", and Ben said, "I think you partially care, which is why you're so upset about this"



"The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265

Stop Expecting Social Reality to Make Sense

re simple models are better: https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2017/01/12/conservatives-over-generalize-liberals-under-generalize/

clumpy thingspace!— https://darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/race-and-realism-part-2/

Michael Arc says: "some sort of discussion of the double standard while unambiguously attaching Trump and lampshading 'Locker Room Talk' would probably be valuable"

Micahel Arc on nerds anchoring on explicit norms: http://lesswrong.com/lw/sq/a_genius_for_destruction/m5g 

Flipping the Frame

Blanchardian Truth Serum— "Bayesian Truth Serum" scoring assigns more weight to "surprisingly popular" answers. Doesn't work when people are self-deceptive, I think?—in Veale's data, people think AGP applies to other people, not them
https://nelmit.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/bts.pdf
http://www.jaimieveale.com/publications/Masters.pdf (p. 82)


push back against the global narrative without pushing back against any particular individual narrative


- meta-political—
* The View From Nowhere
* As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb (polarizing tribal forces—because only bad ppl talk about AGP, you need to be very DGAF about politics in order to not be locked out of the correct explanation—and even then, socialization forces might turn you against your own ppl, something I have to be wary of)
* The Spirit of Compromise; you can't take away transition technology; if you say it can only be used for dysphoria and not fetish, that creates an enormous incentive for self-delusion; even if someone like Kay would prefer that AGPs don't transition, at least getting ppl to admit that there are two types is a next step; maybe _after_ the trans rights movement has won, _then_ suddenly people will feel free to be non-delusional; "partial autogynephilia" may be partially GAMP, but a lot of it is compromise 

you delusional bastards—
* I Want to See You Be Brave
* Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman (critique of https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42#.5dlc2qog6) 
* Review of Nevada

the phenomenon—
* Survey of a Crossdreamscape and Why This Is Pretty Obviously Not What Cis Women Feel About Themselves
* Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer; Or, Could Self-Reports Really Be That Wrong??
* Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals ("trans" vs. "cis" only makes sense if the gradient between full-transition intervention and no intervention is sufficiently sharp)

epistemology—
* The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition
*  (if not super-femme, there must be some other reason ...)
* High-Dimensional Social Science and the Cluster Concept of Concepts
* Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition
* Mary's Room (we have calibration to know that we're probably mostly seeing the same colors up to colorblindness and tetrachromacy, but ppl probably don't mean the same thing by "gender dysphoria" or "identity", or "sexual orientation" (ref pseudobisexuality); the map is not the territory)
* Simple Models Plus Noise Are Better Than Pretending Not to Have a Model (because personal identity doesn't exist, comparing notes with other people and being able to learn from _their_ mistakes is more useful than just saying "everyone has their own experience")


other commentary—
psychological sex differences aren't real, but gender identity is?? always nurture except when politically convenient
Bucketing (go through Wikipedia list of trans women, categorize everyone)
horror story about trans activists being pro-porn, &c. indicating how aliens would analyze them as a subtype of males
* Engineering possibilities (Anne Lawrence identitfy early); people say they wish they could have transitioned younger if they knew it were possible (https://twitter.com/argumentshop/status/815633404943183872), but part of the reason people don't know it's possible is because AGP fantasy is the strongest diagnostic criterion and everyone is lying about this
rachet effect (http://transblog.grieve-smith.com/the-slippery-slope/) (I can't imagine self with short hair)
My Story
* Collective Debt, Collective Shame (what I wanted to say to /r/GenderCritical, why it didn't work, even if they're not so hostile towards Miranda Yardley or the androphilic MtTs who post)
* Someone Has To Say It
* Falsifiability and What We Expect Not to See (this is important for the Bayes crowd)
* critique Julia Serano on nature: of course trans genders are less natural; that's the entire fucking point
* wait, even Julia Serano can't find cis women to date?? http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/14/the-struggle-to-find-trans-love-in-san-francisco.html (I would expect the status boost of being a B-list activist would help; less high-status trans women have even less of a chance)
* the intellectually-honest, transhumanist version of trans rights
* "Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies": https://autogynephiliatruth.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/gender-identity-exists-to-create-special-framework-for-health-insurance-payments/ 

criticism—
Gender of the Gaps (you can always propose an essence when people knock down your ludicrous rationalization)
Time Travel Isn't Real

cathartic—
Napoleon
70s denialists had it right

pages—
compile papers


----

Getting It Right the First Time
Psychological Theories Predict Behavior, Not Just Self-Reports
My Delusional Paraphilia Is the Best Delusional Paraphilia in the World
Dual-Role Transvestism for the 21st Century
 (I pass as college educated)

 
my upsetness at trans activists not respecting _my_ lived experience as AGP is reminicent of narcisstic rage in ppl hwo 

at some point, I want to work in the idea that AGP is a good thing because it's a pro-androgyny force in a world that is otherwise way too gendered for my tastes

counterfeit utility

because we're not narcissists http://elegantgatheringofwhitesnows.com/?p=2270

euphoric effects of E are a placebo effect! https://autogynephiliatruth.wordpress.com/about/#comment-155

very vague childhood memory of wanting to play with my pecs? Is it real??

I'm happy for people to rebuild their lives around a paraphilia. I'm not happy for people to rebuild their lives around a _bad explanation_.

The Girl in the Mirror
The Hand I Was Dealt
A Man With a Transfeminine Side
The Man With the Nonstandard Hormone Balance

not a masculine, macho man, but, you know, the biologically-male kind of man

https://transwidow.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/the-masculinity-of-mtf-transition/

Blanchard tweets me: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160

the story about being on the Portland MAX train and talking to Dap, and then saying hi to the woman 

marketing opportunity? https://bannedbytrans.wordpress.com/speaking-out-against-transactivist-silencing-tactics/

_Someone_ has to be _that asshole_ who says the true thing that everyone else is too cowardly to say, and I guess it's going to have to be me, Taylor Saotome-Westlake.

tailcalled's survey: https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/6hp72p/are_agps_misogynist_results_from_a_survey/

"I was already presenting as female online, and in the pretty niche stuff I was playing around with it seemed like I was a novelty to devs. I got more than a few questions about how I was a girl – who liked computers! The tone was always friendly, but the undertone was clear: I was weird." https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/there-and-back-again (The devs' surprise is making a _correct prediction_)

sorry Dad https://twitter.com/HandOnHilt/status/876880147152072704

http://www.translucidcomic.com/comic/the-pair/

too picky http://pbfcomics.com/comics/matched/

(early play behavior predicts later aggression) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-017-1005-6
(empathizing and systematizing) http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0031661

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/883902728849809409 "being nice to people with a weird disorder but not so nice you forget you're just humoring them" (Yes, exactly)

women do worse on Asch; in contrast, trans women are _selected_ for nonconformity

original research post?— the Hsu–Bailey autopedophilia paper finds a much higher rate of ETLE in pedophiles than in normal men (they say they found 15% AGP in the Mechanical Turk sample gathered for their earlier psychometrics-of-AGP work, but oddly, the psychometrics-of-AGP paper doesn't seem to mention this?? Maybe ask Bailey to clarify sometime??); could this be evidence for the developmental competition effect? (Pedophiles thankfully don't get to actualize their desires, so they fall into ETLI instead?) Similarly, concerning the high IQ of AGP trans women not just being a selection effect: maybe it's because smart people don't get laid (remember that study about a huge fraction of MIT grad students being virgins)

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0118329

Inherent Trade-Offs in risk scoring https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.05807 (via https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6xkyyu/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following/dmk92dw/)

prental T and gynephilia in women and women-adj https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/905572666332987392 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X16301222

http://www.misfile.com/?date=2007-07-05

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0120-x

body measurements dist'ns http://anthro.cs.uni-freiburg.de/#colx=100&coly=6

same-sex couples do less assortative mating! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2843104/


On Mar 4, 2017 3:23 PM, "Zack M. Davis" <main@zackmdavis.net> wrote:

    Genocide is murder of a class of people. Can you be more specific about the class of people you see being murdered (nerdy men?) and what you think is murdering them (the political-correctness memeplex that evolved as a social-control mechanism to prevent the United States from becoming Yugoslavia)?

    I'm guessing you see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria"/actually-doing-something-about-it in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex instead of taking the you're-not-allowed-to-try verbal rules seriously? I agree with this; Blanchard calls this "developmental competition." It's notable that Robert Heinlein's novels have some very strong AGP themes, but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, am about to and feel like it's the right choice on reflection given my historically-anomalous developmental trajectory, even though it probably looks like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men.

    And you think that if the forces of political correctness win and "trans" becomes an entrenched cultural practice, that's like genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues? Whereas from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, it looks like you're trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. (Julia Serano is a prominent trans activist and author of one of the standard articles that get cited to try to "debunk" autogynephilia.) And from inside my Zack-M.-Davis-personal-eclectic-ideology-bubble, I want to rescue the Julia Serano aesthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Robert Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Julia Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Robert Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity and that's just not my style.)
     
    On 2017-03-04 14:12, Michael Vassar wrote:
>     The ACLU needs to address how plausible the arguments for censorship are.  People accepting censorship need to address arguments about how real the harms are. As far as I can tell, you are three maximally concrete and articulate case of a person harness by PC in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide

"Years before that, two different transwomen I knew had pressured me into sending nude photos of my breasts to them." https://4thwavenow.com/2016/04/27/shrinking-to-survive-a-former-trans-man-reports-on-life-inside-queer-youth-culture/


----

Cut from quitting-hormones post (too repetitive given the rest of the blog?)—

I think I would prefer not to say it. But given [cultural](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) and [scholarly]((https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)) evidence that the underlying psychological phenomenon is not that uncommon, and given that trans rights is perhaps _the_ culture war issue of our time, of which the psychological phenomenon is of some relevance to, _someone has to say it_.

And I guess it's going to have to be me, Taylor Saotome-Westlake.

-----

Tail: "zack logic: I don't want an AGP wife because they act too male and that'd be insufficiently female-aligned, I want a cis wife who acts like an AGP wife instead
have you considered just giving in to the AGP life?"

'conditional on "we somehow eliminate all homophobia and bullying of gnc people and so on", how realistic does the following sound?
Gay men no longer repress their GNC, which means they end up socially a lot more like HSTS trans women. (Exactly like HSTS trans women? Or would they be different because lower h on average?) This switches the west to """transgender homosexuality""", as, uh, the newHSTSs (that is, the HSTS-spectrum people who're now feminine in that society but aren't in ours) are now less attractive to each other but more attractive to straight men, and the straight men are less opposed to having sex with them because less homophobia. The newHSTSs are probably going to use HRT, if nothing else then because it makes them more attractive to straight men
because that's the impression I got from TMWWBQ'

-----

The problem is not social engineering! The problem is _incompetent_ social engineering! The problem is not experimenting on children! The problem is experimenting on children in the service of an ideological crusade rather than in the service of finding out what happens!

-----

> And in the online communities I encountered on my journey, and still follow today, I see the same question, repeated over and over, as sweet scared humans pour their vulnerability into a text box, entrusting a group of strangers to help them make the decision of a lifetime:
> 
> What if this is just a fetish?
>
> —https://medium.com/gender-shrug/just-1b8c09a11f18

https://player.fm/series/opening-up-behind-the-scenes-of-our-open-marriage/8-johns-kink-with-consequences


https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/72vi36/foia_request_for_wansink_emails_show_how_an_ivy/dnmp0q9/ (relate to Conchran on lost knowledge?)


Vee String review: still ... noticeably not part of my body.

(That was the same thing I thought about breastforms. Considering how that escalted, maybe it would be better for my health and bodily integrity to not pursue this line of thinking ...)

----

tail: secretly, all AGP trans women are clockable because you can just look at the hobbies

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/78zw2h/how_many_of_you_were_confused_by_a_transformation/

He has a wife and kids to support (if this is 1998) or her FFS bill to pay off (if this is (2018)

etymology fun fact: "male" comes from the Latin malus, meaning "bad"

---

on a Facebook thread about female-dominated gym classes, a female acquaintance writes, "My class focuses on weightlifting and it's still all women (including one trans, oddly enough)." (You wouldn't say "oddly enough" if you actually believed that trans women are women!)

This is so great (super-AGP 13th century Jewish narrative)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160420122918/http://www.on1foot.org/text/even-bochan-kalonymus-ben-kalonymus
http://www.on1foot.org/text/even-bochan-kalonymus-ben-kalonymus
http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/On-Becoming-A-Woman.pdf

https://theestablishment.co/yes-trans-women-can-get-period-symptoms-e43a43979e8c

Rya comes out as AGP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ferdf6iRTOg

----

I really hope there's a way to use frequencies and Bayes nets to disprove dysphoria→AGP causal direction, particularly because then I'll be able to call the post "Algebraic Typology"

I thought of this pun first/independently: https://twitter.com/WildStoryWoman/status/927514752405737474

BIID: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28711223/?i=1&from=body%20integrity%20identity%20disorder

the heartbreaking misogyny of my native subculture (not that I'm any different): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/7bjywe/wellness_wednesday_8th_november_2017/dpitpnu/

Christian AGP repressor: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG7sNHEv-HMKwGQE9RS2byQ

Binnie-ism: https://twitter.com/FioraAeterna/status/928664101013790720

----


but now I'm watching TV
and I have a new actress crush
Lauren Ash
maybe it's just the character she's playing, but she seems slightly facially masculinized?
but so curvy
so my type
America Ferrera is also in this show
I remember her from Ugly Betty, which I would watch at the University in 2007
before the personality-altering nervous breadown that led me to quit
there was a trans woman character on that show, but she was played by Rebecca Romijn
there was a poignant line (you know it's poignant when you can remember a line from a TV show you saw ten years ago) where she says to her brother, "Look into my eyes, Danny; it's the only thing they couldn't change"
and how do I put this
my blog would sound a lot less transphobic if we had the technology to make AGPs look like Rebecca Romijn
Trent - Today at 11:17 PM
it would sound more transphobic, no? you'd have transitioned, so you wouldn't be concerned with some of the signalling you do now (e.g. woman as a gender rather than transwoman as one) and may indeed be actively signalling that you haven't signed the contract, Yardley-style; the idea it'd be less transphobic assumes becoming Romijn would put you more in line with trans topics as well
(unless I'm misinterpreting something, which is a reasonable assumption)
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 11:19 PM
you're right; I wasn't taking the hypothetical seriously enough

> ("Since I was 5, I felt like I've been dropped in the wrong skin. This is about correcting a mistake." "Oh, is that all it is? Really?" "That's the fast version.")

sex diffs in paraphilias: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/669634/pdf

malpractice lawsuit (can't find better public info): https://detransitionedwomenresistadf.wordpress.com/2017/11/19/first-blog-post/

transition didn't change crime rate: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

"... your identity is supposed to describe the problems you face in your life, not manufacture them": http://neat-dyke.tumblr.com/post/167070168982/old-school-butch-neat-dyke-something-that

http://neat-dyke.tumblr.com/post/162258180487/on-being-a-young-butch-lesbian-at-pride-2017

http://neat-dyke.tumblr.com/post/154578646192/negative-social-effects-of-my-mastectomy

productivity lifehacks: do excellent work in an extremely low-status field that you'd be mortified to be primarily known for, thus forcing yourself to also do excellent work in another area in order to rescue your reputation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7757667
https://clarissasblog.com/2014/05/14/i-dont-want-to-hire-women/

drawn by a cis woman?? http://weknowmemes.com/2013/11/perks-of-being-a-woman/

"Impact of Using Non-Birth Sex on the Interpretation of Spirometry Data in Subjects With Air-Flow Obstruction": http://rc.rcjournal.com/content/early/2017/11/28/respcare.05586

decrease in IQ on puberty suppression: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00528/full

AGP pride flag origin: https://4archive.org/board/lgbt/thread/8628058/attached-image-is-the-agp-pride-flag-black-represents-the-r

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/6uc18b/has_any_of_you_felt_horny_when_using_a_packer_for/

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/kbxw7v/i-was-robbed-of-my-transgender-childhood

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/4ltxc1/does_anyone_else_get_really_turned_on_checking/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/7iqcaf/told_my_wife_i_want_to_transition/

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/5axie2/nsfw_im_mtf_i_feel_like_my_body_is_aroused_and/

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/7vdw5u/arousal_is_really_messing_with_my_head/

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/7yfyp2/anybody_discover_they_were_trans_though_sissy_porn/

https://np.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/8hob8i/why_do_i_do_this_nsfw/

Lindsay Shepherd/James Damore shipfic

https://medium.com/@aytchellis/is-it-possible-to-change-sex-8d863ce7fca2

Brazillian woman moves to Sweeden and cherished egalitarian culture: https://medium.com/@sayhellotovanessa/the-oddities-of-being-an-invisible-woman-8570394caa0d

most of men's attractiveness is cues of upper-body strength: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1869/20171819

> In the psychiatric evaluation, Johnson reveals that Kaczynski had persistent and intense sexual fantasies about being a woman. While he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in 1967, he went to a psychiatrist to discuss his wishes for a sex change operation. But in the waiting room, he decided he could not go forward. Instead, he told the psychiatrist he was depressed about the possibility of being drafted.
>
> — https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/09/12/gender-confusion-sex-change-idea-fueled-kaczynskis-rage-report-says/eb33b946-8595-427d-af4c-9ccaada45935/?utm_term=.6222611253f6

so I'm watching more of the retail comedy with :hearts:♡ Lauren Ash ♡:hearts:,  and I think it's just _sociologically fascinating_ how the writers are playing Culture War (guest star character is pro-bathroom bill, and our protagonists are sneeringly like, "Wow, that's so bigoted")
like, this is how social change happens
with a conspiracy of NBC comedy writers conspiring to hamfistedly socially intimidate their viewers into not believing anything uncool
that's my second thought, anyway
my first thought is
OMG ★♡ Lauren Ash ♡★ I want to be ~~with~~ her

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/culture/erik-soderstrom/2016/09/23/superstore-goes-strike-mocks-bigots-against-transgender

> Garrett: Hey, nik-nik-nikki. I had a quick just, like, silly question for you. Uh, how serious are you about all this sort of trans bathroom stuff?
Nikki: What do you mean?
Garrett: I mean, like, is it the only thing you think about or is it more like one of those barely talk about it, just how you were raised, opinion could change if you surrounded yourself with a cooler, more diverse group of friends type deals?

(it's interesting that there's one other (semi-) widely-recognized expansion of that initialism)

the "husband and provider and guardian of a small AI" game looks fun, that I would be so good at it that the thought isn't worth dropping just because you deserve Bob and Alice doesn't want me and Carol doesn't want me and Edith quietly detests me and Georgia belongs to Dave and the owners of OKCupid have pissed themselves laughing about how much money I'm paying them for the privilege of knowing that _ and _ haven't read my poem

"You women and your risk-aversion (compared to men) due to lower reproductive variance (than men) in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness" is what my analogue who is not forbidden from such thoughts would say

I like her as a person but am very conscious of the extent to which I am currently on her good side due to luck and carefully deceptive handling

(I don't even think I know what I use internally; my blog says "trans women" as two words so as not to pile insult onto injury) but my model, under whatever word, is "guys like me"

like many bottom-80-percentile males, I'm ambiguous on the sign of the poly thing


suffering is the chisel God uses to shape us into our true selves

suffering is bad in general, but I've already used up my please-take-care-of-me-I'm-hurt quota for the year, which means I have to enthusiastically endorse any emotional pain that happens to me today

everyone already knows to be cynical about cola commercials, but somehow people expect "Seek medical care if you're concerned" to be taken literally

"We have so much in common!" I said. "Too much," she said.
the cognitive dissonance that makes "all trans women" and "all closet crossdressers" the only stable equilibria for social circles of AGP males in a culture without a public concept of AGP
https://transblog.grieve-smith.com/the-essential-conflict/

at JCC camp, I remember saying that I wasn't the kind of guy who was interested in big breasts. "Well, then you're not a guy," I was told. But actually I just hadn't hit puberty yet

Like, I used to tack the word "aspiring" in front as my preferred means of indicating that we don't think we've already solved rationality. Nowadays, I just reach for the scare quotes.

While I agree that words can be used in many ways depending on context, I claim that sometimes it's useful to use this top-20 noun to refer strictly to the same thing it's always referred to for the past 200,000 years since language evolved, even if we have reasonably chosen to broaden the extension of that noun to also include other, relevantly similar things in most day-to-day contexts! Given that people are capable of inferring what is meant from the relevant context, this won't confuse anyone, and we can continue peacefully using language to describe reality. Then, we can use those descriptions of reality to formulate plans! Plans that will steer the universe into regions of configuration space that rank higher in our individual and collective preference orderings!

NRx-inspired (sigh ... yes, unfortunately) points—

(most of this should probably be split into a separate post even if I'm happening to do some outlining in this file; evil speculation shouldn't contaminate the solid "Infovism" idea/slogan)—

 * democracy is government by whichever memes happen to be the most virulent
 * outcomes of the long run of a one-dimensional conflict can be classified, roughly something like: Left total victory, right total victory, mutually assured destruction, and program equilibrium
    * program equilibrium isn't easy/possible for humans
    * the key point here is that "grant this demand, deny all others" isn't a
      defensible Schelling point; if you yield here, the _same algorithm_ is
      going to be running the next time
 * "Berkeley 2009 morality was just right, but this Berkeley 2017 bullshit has
   gone _too far_!"
    * If I were dictator, (Berkeley, 2009) could be made to work, but everyone has her own (city, year) pair
       * for some reason I thought this was analogous to something from the
         Coherent Extrapolated Volition document: Dennis thinks he should own
         the world, but fairness requires that Dennis's name be erased from any
         such request, and "some X should own the world" is underspecified"
 * remember my conversation with a certain female bio-/psychologist studying at
   Harvard who told me that "Trans women are men with a mental illness" made
   more sense, but that she was afraid to even think that within the privacy of
   her own head
    * fucking _Harvard_
 * Moldbug, "The True Meaning of Diversity": "Certainly not every party member
   is an [X]. Most of them, in fact, are not. Nor is it absolutely guaranteed
   that every single [X] will be a party member. But most of them, in fact,
   are"—thus, requiring representaiton of Xes benefits the party
 * practice of deferring to designated-victim trans women _makes the trans
   women worse people_: if you know that you can win a dispute by playing the
   transphobia card, that incentive shapes your life (Moldbug: discussion of
   "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
    * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
      personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust


feminists are masculinized: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4158978/

APA pronoun stickers: https://twitter.com/4th_WaveNow/status/950052584416595969
(original is https://twitter.com/Lucia_A_Schwarz/status/949315365842116608 )

women's voices allegedly getting deeper?!— https://twitter.com/degenrolf/status/949530603342454784

https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/7py0ic/fetishizing_yourself/

https://medium.com/eden-the-cat/please-stop-making-me-come-out-as-non-binary-at-work-ab72e17abbcc
https://medium.com/eden-the-cat/i-came-out-as-non-binary-a-year-ago-here-is-my-experience-177f74fc553e

Tailcalled: "The five genders, chad, male, enby, female, stacy"

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/7s4bu2/as_a_lesbian_in_university_i_feel_increasingly/

https://theestablishment.co/japanese-cartoon-porn-helped-me-understand-my-trans-identity-d5bba16cdaf3

AAP: https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/7s8twd/do_trans_natal_males_fetishize_teenage_girlhood/dt3ea2n/

the conjunction of anti-transphobia and anti-Islamophobia is very strange

https://voices.avoiceformen.com/j4mb/2018/01/15/terrified-patient-treated-like-transphobic-bigot/ —this is a compelling fiction prompt! Sad that a male author like me would be needed to fill in the "evolutionary radfem" niche—have the protagonist be hyperaware of the Rotherdam betrayal

Zucker et al. study that's one of the sources of "majority desist" claims ("Demographics, behavior problems, and psychosexual characteristics of adolescents with gender identity disorder or transvestic fetishism") https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22390530

Tailcalled—
Old: A*P is caused by internalized sexism, thinking that you have to be a boy to be masculine and have to be a girl to be feminine
Bold: A*P is caused by lack of sexism, thinking that you can be masculine/nerdy as a girl and feminine/sensitive as a boy

https://pasunhomme.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/crossdressing-and-the-untransy-valley/

like, I regard—

 * transitioning and passing (or passing-adj) as a good outcome
 * transitioning and not-passing as a bad outcome,
 * soft body mods (e.g. my breasts)/occasional transvestism without social transition as a good outcome
 * nonbinary-but-unwilling-to-explain-what-that-means-because-MIGI as a bad outcome (because people are still going to notice your biological sex and make probabilistic inferences about it, but feel socially obligated to pretend that they aren't, and ubiquitous socially-obligatory lies are bad), and
 * NB-adj transfeminine or transmasculine as an explicit third-gender role as a good outcome, but a very tricky social-engineering problem to establish that niche where it doesn't already exist
 
https://twitter.com/KJ_Harrison/status/958435696359993345

distinguish between two types of culture war: when you're demonizing the enemy as orcs, and when you're fighting for the outcome of what happens to people _just like you_

it won't look like that for me due to ideological factors
"No, I'm not transitioning; I just want to get back on HRT again, for Science"
1 BLOCKED MESSAGE
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 7:48 PM
"No, it's not facial feminization surgery; it's just a different cosmetic procedure that happens to be performed by the same doctor"

(on the phone during supermarket checkout) "No, it's just a brain transplant into a artificial vat-grown female body." (store clerk says, "Have a good day, ma'am") "That's very kind of you to say, but—"

I need to write a magical-realism short story pushing on the analogies between dating as a hot girl and job-searching as a good programmer. Specifically, a story a world in which all engineers are female and all businesspeople are male, dwelling on the theme that on the one hand, it's nice to protected and valued and be taken care of, but on the other hand, it's exploitative that the class of protectors is freeloading off the creative labor of your class, which they could never produce on their own (smash capitalism/the patriarchy!!)

Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:00 AM
"I totally agree with [one-sentence literal summary of the movement's goals], I just disagree with [every other belief and instrumental strategy connotationally associated with the movement]"
... actually, this generalized situation (meeting the criteria of a simple verbal definition, but not being part of that cluster in configuration space along most dimensions) sounds awfully familiar
... I'm pro-trans in the same sense that AGP trans women are women
vaticidalprophet - Today at 12:02 AM
I get the feeling ever saying those words invalidates you from all definitions of 'pro-trans' even if they are strictly speaking correct
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:03 AM
but Treeeeent, the bullet-biting æsthetic
vaticidalprophet - Today at 12:03 AM
jesus, Oberlo is taking a long time to update the prices on my sketchy streetwear dropshipping store
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:03 AM
you can tell I'm serious about it because I bothered to grab the æ ligatrue
vaticidalprophet - Today at 12:04 AM
I can tell you're pretentious because you bothered to grab it, that's orthogonal
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 12:04 AM
"... ligatrue?" "Yes."

----

to say on FB after "The Categories" is finished??

So, hopefully this version is a lot clearer and less needlessly dramatic than my kamikaze halt-melt-catch-fire public tantrum/mental-breakdown of this time last year: [blog link]

[share memory]

-----

https://www.wired.com/2009/03/designerdebate/
cellular-level sex differences  http://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpcell.00281.2013

Effects of prenatal androgens on rhesus monkeys https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3146061/

https://theestablishment.co/why-we-must-stop-calling-menstruation-a-womens-issue-a9c58c677f7c

https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/969660864641953792

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/9-things-people-get-wrong-about-being-non-binary

60,000 likes for "Some men have a uterus": https://twitter.com/PPIndKentucky/status/969384341636861952

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_flank_effect

demography: https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/974750991756283904

http://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/172312442416/trying-to-talk-to-trans-people-about-their-sexual any scale that involves "pretending you’re a woman" in the instructions is OK by me

http://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/172395616411/explanations-for-distinct-clusters-of-transgender

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/blood-boundaries-should-transfusions-be-matched-by-sex/

Nothing we haven't seen before, but God Herself above, this fucking poll and thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89s93d/getting_so_much_transierthanthou_flak_for_being/

Culture War gem mining, traditionalism for the family: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/88zgv0/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_2_2018/dwt8kjb/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/04/biohacking-siren-song/557849/

----

A female commenter on one of Giego's posts—

"When I do experience strong attraction, it feels like being scared of the power of attraction itself. It's pleasantly thrilling rather than aversive, but the fear is real, and it's just as compelling as any other fear. This feeling is what produces my coy behaviors like smiling and looking away.

"In this way, I literally *feel* whatever this delay mating instinct is.

"I can't just decide not to feel it. I will feel it no matter what.

"Also, I enjoy the thrill. I don't *want* to get rid of it. I would prefer to experience more of it. If you want to talk about sheer hedonism, I would definitely want to keep this feeling if I were to re-engineer my brain. The feeling of anticipation or suspense is very enjoyable for me."

----

fake implies artificial (but not vice versa)

Cut from "Reply to The Unit" (too far afield, not sure what point I'm trying to make): speculating about unproven sex differences isn't _quite_ as prejudicial as it sounds: if a 19th century scholar, knowing nothing of sex chromosomes, had reasoned, "Whatever the physical mechanism of heredity turns out to be, it probably distinguishes between males and females". (Is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_determination a counterexample or the dreaded "example that proves the rule" like pipefish or the Eurasian dotterel?)

the ultimate AGP weekend project (like crossdressing, but with more code): http://svencharleer.com/blog/2018/02/02/family-fun-with-deepfakes-or-how-i-got-my-wife-onto-the-tonight-show/

"right"-aligned folk like to say the IAT is "pseudoscientific bullshit", but what if those failed replications are just committing Goldberg's "fallacy of the irrelevant experiment"? Here's a pro-IAT _and_ pro-stereotype-accuracy take: "blacks are violent" stereotype strength varies with local crime rates http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550617753522 (via https://twitter.com/mjbsp/status/983338239221293057)

want to get around to watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDDIWGlBt3o

Tips for arguing with libtards:
 * They don't like the "Don't negotiate with terrorists" frame because they don't understand analogies; need to find gentler frames
 * They'll believe that you're AGP, but they don't want you to say that other people are AGP because they don't understand that the self is still a part of objective reality; need to explain why it matters

Consider an illustrative diagram in which there is a hard line in the combined height–weight configuration space, but the line isn't describable in terms of height or weight alone. If there were sufficiently many more traits/dimensions, we could imagine "not describable in terms of some small number of variables n" starting to look more like "not explicitly describable by humans."

(not gender-related but I don't have a good notes system): E. Weinstein on IQ: https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/987833935185952768

"Prenatal endocrine influences on sexual orientation and on sexually differentiated childhood behavior" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3296090/

The sad thing is, not only is AGP not the same thing as what women feel, a lot of woman are disgusted by it: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/8e9gd6/what_men_find_behind_female_masks/dxtgrcp/

https://feminina.eu/2017/12/28/my-current-philosophical-struggles/

http://strip.villainette.com/20180205

Yes, my Friendship Problems are proof of my female MIGI: "The overall rates of friendship conflict did not differ between men and women, but women were more likely to clash with close friends, to express feelings of anguish over the breakup, and to be more demanding of evidence of remorse before reconciling." — https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/science/friendship-discrimination.html   

women Cooperate less in Prisoner's Dilemma?! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691817305917

degrees of FBOE and GNC https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-017-0980-y

T. accurately psychoanalyzes me: "she doesn't want men and women to be different, and spends a lot of time minimizing these differences, except when she's trying to be more ego-syntonic about the decision to live as male
in which case she writes giant blog posts on how real and massive it is"

"women drivers" stereotype vs. car insurance acturaries

"as we all know the two genders are math and pregnant" https://rationalists-out-of-context.tumblr.com/post/171916119173/as-we-all-know-the-two-genders-are-math-and?is_related_post=1#notes

_Dumbing of Age_ Carla "There's a _reason_ for that" http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/purpleandskates/

how does the "women like close-knit friends, whereas men like large, loose coalitions" interact with sex-segregated spaces?—would seem to imply _less_ demand for female-only than male-only quasi-public spaces

another crime list: http://appropriately-inappropriate.tumblr.com/post/161606755575/the-tip-of-the-iceberg-please-add-to-this-list

https://www.autostraddle.com/how-to-have-trans-woman-lesbian-sex-with-a-penis-414839/


Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 9:07 AM
@tail (Richard) "LG doesn't belong with T because" this needs to be blogged; should I credit you?
tail (Richard) - Today at 9:07 AM
:spray: you need to stop being TERFy :thunk:
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 9:08 AM
then TERFs should stop having such good jokes
tail (Richard) - Today at 9:08 AM
(this is a significant TERF controversy - not sure if you've heard of it :thunk: )
oh
the joke was mine
the argument that LG and T don't belong are TERFs
Carrie Zelda-Michelle Davis - Today at 9:10 AM
I guess I should have quoted the whole thing; I was familiar with the talking point, but it's funny that a naive observer should say, "Um, you mean that the other way around, right? Trans is the intersex condition, LG is sexual orientation"  and then the speaker would say "No"
tail (Richard) - Today at 9:10 AM
ah ok, thought you cut off the joke because you were referring to the talking point
NEW MESSAGES
tail (Richard) - Today at 9:12 AM
mm, I don't care that much about getting credited but it'd probably be nice (as long as the credit doesn't make me look TERFy :V)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/8izbbj/prevalence_of_the_wish_to_be_of_the_opposite/

I wasn't brave enough to take a she/her sticker, but it would have been in character, Twilight Sparkle

I've heard of fake geek girls, but this is ridiculous

big brain sex differences study with pretty pictures and d-values: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhy109/4996558

body horror: https://girl-unashamed.tumblr.com/post/174051510579/parthenogenon-billnihilism-also-i-have-had

the recording here also has stop-recording exchange: https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/degenderettes-qa-san-francisco-5-12-2018/

Blanchard on the record about "homosexual" terminology: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/999680624817508352


https://twitter.com/RachelRMoran/status/1060311474780946432

http://abc30.com/homeless-women-harassed-in-shower-lawsuit-says/3514544/

https://medium.com/@maybekatz/on-the-design-of-womens-spaces-72bf8f396dc0

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5799375/Anti-HPV-jab-given-teenage-boys-identify-girls.html

Yaaaaaay eugenics https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40592-018-0081-2

Hilarious http://skeletonclaw.com/post/102911594023

https://femsplain.com/on-being-non-binary-in-female-spaces-12d5980e7f0c

"Genome-wide association study reveals sex-specific genetic architecture of facial attractiveness" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/06/339226

Connecticut farce gets worse: https://twitter.com/GameTimeCT/status/1003739370736816129

Gnon dislikes too much sexual dimorphism!! (HT Hanson) http://www.kokkonuts.org/wp-content/uploads/Kokko.pdf

Any% run: https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/6o3gve/cyberdemon531_makes_a_drunk_idiot_of_herself/dkecra4/

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/sex-change-killer-to-be-free-as-a-bird/news-story/b1fecc9a9a4717607de6e980980e0ba5?sv=e95663cd723e2f8ffa0caa3329e03203

"The Masculine Woman’s War on Gender Roles" http://www.ericwulff.com/blog/?p=1861

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html

http://theweek.com/articles/715794/how-single-men-women-are-making-politics-more-extreme

https://twitter.com/goldmansachs/status/747834825831292928?lang=en

C. Clymer roundup:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/991707514294194176.html
https://mashable.com/2018/06/23/charlotte-clymer-twitter-thread-cuba-libre/#HzX3Kmpl3PqB
https://www.metroweekly.com/2018/06/transgender-woman-says-she-was-kicked-out-of-popular-d-c-restaurant-for-using-womens-restroom/
https://twitter.com/ChelseaClinton/status/1010596357093117953
https://twitter.com/cmclymer/status/1060699882506383360

"It’s officially impossible to find regular real lesbians unless you happen to stumble upon them in the wild ..."
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/8mahdy/peak_trans_vii_tell_your_story_here/e1jtuqz/

https://medium.com/@dtwps/all-these-black-characters-and-0-done-right-how-steven-universe-fails-its-black-fanbase-part-i-81e0b0b8c3fe

4 for 4 https://twitter.com/InnerCityFish/status/1015203128885567493

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/08/government-drops-doctor-says-gender-given-birth/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1531034286

https://twitter.com/_sagesharp_/status/1015755975687430145

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8xa97t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_09_2018/e228vyj/ "Literally all they have to say is 'I'm not physically attracted to every woman in the world'" (But that's not their True Rejection! Are you really in favor of Universal Socially-Mandatory Lies?!)

https://where.coraline.codes/blog/oscon/

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/07/06/changing-the-concept-of-woman-will-cause-unintended-harms

Riley is in the rewriting-her-past stage (just like all the other lesbians, I thought I had to like boys because of heteronormativity—and, "want her or be her" fantasy—only a brief mention that TERFs suck): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H34a-EIzSIs

What moral should we derive from the experience of breaking a condom inside of a Fleshlight?
It's like running over a pedestrian in a driving simulator
You'd think it would teach you that such a tiny mistake could have such enormous, life-altering consequences
Except for the context in which there are no consequences

DSM specifics as historical accident: https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1023199189046579200

Posie Parker interview: https://auticulture.com/the-liminalist-161-posie-parker/

https://medium.com/@JonahMix/playing-the-intersex-card-3d95bb29ea16

on the internet and tell lies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHrZRJR4igQ

just watched "Return to Tomorrow"—so wait, Kirk _and_ Spock both got to be women??

pity for the secret-sharing squirrels https://cptsdcarlosdevil.tumblr.com/post/176414647498/i-think-a-lot-of-my-relationship-advice-is-deeply

notable for the IRB-servitude if nothing else: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/114404/how-to-query-gender-in-a-multiple-choice-poll-survey 

https://twitter.com/compiledwrong/status/994263573512601600 "How long does it take you to stop feeling like a guest in the house after you join a new company?"—when I feel OK about always choosing the female variant reaction emoji

https://twitter.com/turnthetide2018/status/1023959468764213248

http://andrewgelman.com/2007/08/14/more_taboo_rese/

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/howie_carr/2018/08/howie_carr_jim_lyons_out_pcs_the_democrats The only thing that would make this story more entertaining is if the Democrats bit the bullet and approved every amendment. (Or earnestly debated that e.g. there should be exactly one of "cis female" and "cis woman" &c.)

I should read Li Kung and Hines 2017 https://twitter.com/rftbk/status/1027314120381620230

The Rust survey asks: "If you find it difficult to participate in the Rust community, and feel comfortable giving more details, please tell us what makes it difficult" with the subhead "Optional. Please share only what you are comfortable sharing". I write: "I have some nuanced and detailed views on transgender issues that I suspect might make me a target for exclusion if people knew about them? Mostly this doesn't matter (the community is focused on technology, as it should be), but it does feel slightly sad to be socially incentivized to separate the technology-focused and sociopolitically-focused aspects of one's public intellectual persona (by having a second blog under a pseudonym, &c.) in a way that people with other views probably aren't."

what can go wrong: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/95z2zj/i_dont_think_im_going_to_my_girls_hobby_club/

Tail pasted a graph from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7895384_Masculine_Girls_and_Feminine_Boys_Genetic_and_Environmental_Contributions_to_Atypical_Gender_Development_in_Early_Childhood that showed heritable/shared/nonshared bars

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/online-dating-out-of-your-league/567083/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/us/target-transgender-idaho-voyeurism.html?_r=0

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 9:11 AM, Zack M. Davis <main@zackmdavis.net> wrote:
The family resemblance between me and my sister is quite striking (much more so, I think, than the resemblance between us and either parent); we have the same nose, same dark hair that curls into raidus-half-inch helices, maybe similar mannerisms, probably similar cognitive profiles. Unlike me, my sister is socially well-adjusted. [...]  If it's actually the case that one's will is subtly out of alignment with a hypermajority of healthy people in ways that are predictable and causally related to one's medical condition, that might be really disappointing from some grand fun-theoretic universe-design sense, but in the real world where one is not God and everything outside of one's skull is a constant, not being delusional about the degree of alignment might actually be useful in learning how to cooperate better, if mere cooperation is the best we can do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/business/media/charlottesville-jason-kessler-npr.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Scattered Personal Reflections After a Tech Conference; Or, Smile More; https://rust-lang.github.io/rustconf-2018-keynote/#56

AGP-motivated radfem alignment https://twitter.com/michaelbeltis/status/1032042346450276352

Moldbug's deep rhetorical game: https://theotherlifenow.com/bear-traps/

when social-justice people say that language is "outdated", do they have an idea of what changed? There may be an uncomfortable analogy here to programmers who want to insist on the latest version of everything even when the old stuff still works!

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/evkwm4/how-to-be-an-ally-to-non-binary-gender-non-conforming-people-support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inoculation_theory

----

Extracted from one of my SEXNET posts—

Unrelatedly, Beck et al. note in passing a fascinating finding that I think deserves more examination:

> Gender portrayal seems to vary based on target audience. In genres and channels targeting boys, girls are more likely to be depicted as smarter, less emotional, and more technically savvy (Baker & Raney, 2007; Gerding and & Signorielli, 2014; Thompson & Zerbinos, 1995). Conversely, genres and channels targeting girl viewers depict boys as more emotional and affectionate than do boy-oriented media (Aubrey & Harrison, 2004; Hentges & Case, 2013).

The authors go on to state that "[i]n sum, children's media reinforce gender role binaries and suggest that our culture values strictly delineated gender roles." But left unexplained is why a culture that values strictly delineated gender roles would optimize for portraying girls with masculine-coded virtues in boys' media and boys with feminine-coded virtues in girls' media. (An alternative theory that does predict this particular datum is that media producers are incentivized to cater to children's egocentric fantasies of the other sex's psychology being more like their own ...)


-----

Extracted from reply to Ozy on categories—

> Conversely, as far as I can tell, there has yet to be a single transgender NFL football player, while statistically there ought to be five currently playing.

A side note, but—this doesn't actually seem hard to explain. If the ought-to-be-five means MtFs, well, you _can't_ transition MtF and _stay_ in the NFL—HRT is going to kill your performance. Even if you think the effect size of hormones is overhyped, this is a _very_ competitive area, you can't say, "Oh, it only affected performance like ten percent, that's nothing—ten percent is _huge_." This doesn't rule out Jenner-class eggs in the NFL.

And if it means FtMs, well, people get into football as teenagers: there are going to be structural reasons making that difficult even if gynephilic FtMs _are_ the sort of people who would like to play (difficulty of transitioning _that_ early _and_ being stealthy about it, and difficulty of being accepted as one of the guys if you're not stealthy—let alone NFL/NCAA policy about steroid use, if the matter has even come up, which is probably hasn't)

The tone of the video news report here makes me nervous (_deception_ is a crime, but the fetish itself shouldn't disqualify him from being a _crossing guard_) https://www.abc15.com/news/crime/pd-gilbert-man-fakes-down-syndrome-hires-caregivers-to-bathe-him-and-change-diapers

This is basically the _Quillette_ article that I wanted to write: https://quillette.com/2018/09/12/stereotypes-are-often-harmful-and-accurate/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijop.12529

https://lesbian-rights-nz.org/shame-receipts/

Has someone done the game-theoretic microfoundations of radical feminism?

another ROGD referral graph: https://twitter.com/LavenderVerse/status/1042573498592501763

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/unisex-changing-rooms-put-women-in-danger-8lwbp8kgk

CoC thread (I donated $10 to the author for this): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1041668315947708416.html
https://mobile.twitter.com/unconed/status/1045325718056554498

https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/19/transgender-teen-to-admit-murdering-parents-who-refused-to-accept-her-transition-7960036/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/8mahdy/peak_trans_vii_tell_your_story_here/e69oh83/

dystopia where all women call themselves nonbinary and men call themselves trans women

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9ejzkm/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_10/e64jjos/?context=3&sort=best

https://www.expressnews.com/news/local/article/Transgender-woman-in-San-Antonio-files-13244056.php?utm_campaign=twitter-mobile&utm_source=CMS%20Sharing%20Button&utm_medium=social  "male or female gender should be self-identified and self-reported for the purpose of blood donation"

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/09/how-i-was-hounded-off-campus-for-saying-women-dont-have-penises/

https://www.econlib.org/you-dont-understand-our-culture/

https://twitter.com/tvandreacross/status/1043603304763351041 made me wonder why I haven't heard "Make it easier to get a GRC, but revoke it as part of the penalty for crimes, especially sex crimes" proposed as a compromise

WTF _Nature_ redux https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nature%2Frss%2Fcurrent+%28Nature+-+Issue%29

https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/2017/b263563.html

https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesCantorPhD/status/1012722559874486272

Damore is working again https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849

HSTS doesn't like being asked pronouns https://twitter.com/Kinesis/status/1046485034113220608

Numbers 31:15–18

וַיֹּאמֶר אֲלֵיהֶם מֹשֶׁה הַֽחִיִּיתֶם כָּל־נְקֵבָֽה׃ 

"Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them.


 וְעַתָּה הִרְגוּ כָל־זָכָר בַּטָּף וְכָל־אִשָּׁה יֹדַעַת אִישׁ לְמִשְׁכַּב זָכָר הֲרֹֽגוּ

Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,


 וְכֹל הַטַּף בַּנָּשִׁים אֲשֶׁר לֹא־יָדְעוּ מִשְׁכַּב זָכָר הַחֲיוּ לָכֶֽם

but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.


What actual women are like vs. feminist power fantasy: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8tpcyn/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_25_2018/e1f67ky/
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters

reading the famous Flight 93 essay and coming across a scare-quoted "cis-genderism", I want to say, "You mean _cisnormativity_"

my insufficiently-requited love retweeted this: https://twitter.com/EscapologistFi/status/1052650770624118785

http://www.jbhe.com/features/53_SAT.html

Singal on pediatrics society statement: https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1052939041069588480 (follow-up for critique of Ozy on ROGD!!!)

https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1053633641161678848

Rachel McKinnon documents say she's a woman https://archive.is/PWmOP https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1053633641161678848
Rachel McKinnon on her opponents making gender-identity https://archive.is/mmhwU

https://doesnthavetobethisway.wordpress.com/2014/07/19/nametags-pronouns-and-lifting-the-burden/

EUGENICS https://www.wired.com/story/pinterest-skin-tone-search/?fbclid=IwAR27gG2-MZOuYjRBxcZCGK2J4x9rEcrD6rM-8W8H37b5GS5UWJnZEqffUjI

Request for social technology: again, we really need to do something about the problem where civil-and-charitable discourse culture tends to degenerate into "I accept a belief from you, if you accept a belief from me" social exchange, which rewards dogmatic incumbents. (Submissive people trying to be charitable think, "The incumbent didn't respond to my argument! Maybe I'm wrong!" when maybe they should be less submissive and instead think, "The incumbent is being willfully stupid! No update!") So, we know that personal character attacks are bad and need to be quashed. But maybe "arrogance and contempt towards worldviews which I claim have bugs in addition to their already well-known features" is OK? We know that argument NEVER gets bullet. We know that argument NEVER gets personal attack. But a lot of people seem to think that if argument doesn't get counterargument, that means that argument wins. And that's not right! Maybe sometimes argument deserves, "No update, no time to explain; I falsifiably predict that you'll thank me later." Sometimes this prediction will be wrong! But sometimes it will come true eight years later!

("And he cried out, one last cry under the consciousness of Odeen, except that somehow it was the cry of Dua. 'No, we can't stop the market. We are the market. We—'")

"Transsexualism is primarily a type of individual psychopathology. It secondarily acquires the properties of a political or religious movement when individual transsexuals form up into networks."— https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1056219179399962631

https://www.essence.com/news/16-year-old-black-teen-tells-dr-phil-shes-white-and-hates-black-people/

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/10/30/transgender-woman-gets-18-month-sentence-for-sexually-assaulting-daughter.html

https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/trans-man-sauna/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07238-8

more Yearwood: https://abcnews.go.com/US/transgender-teens-outrun-track-field-competitors-critics-close/story?id=55856294
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2810857-andraya-yearwood-knows-she-has-the-right-to-compete


https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6179341/Outrage-transgender-child-groomer-legally-female-womens-jail.html

https://www.wweek.com/news/2018/11/07/a-transgender-powells-employee-says-the-bookstore-refused-to-designate-a-gender-neutral-restroom-in-its-corporate-office/

HSTS typology-discovering narrative: https://twitter.com/Kinesis/status/1060452237967675392

https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/UC-Berkeley-campus-senator-abstains-from-a-vote-13378621.php?t=bd81bb94a4#photo-16472734

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/drunken-transgender-women-stamp-defenceless-13566104

https://truethingsiwishicouldsay.tumblr.com/post/179846906643/this-is-the-new-queer-compulsory-heterosexuality

https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/midwives-rail-against-proposal-to-call-women-persons-in-new-code-of-conduct/news-story/0c3b37b55934effcfc48498b64a1256f

skeleton sex denialism: https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/575536/

medical records: https://twitter.com/HairyLeggdHarpy/status/1062360988702466048

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7724502/cop-child-sex-offences-woman/amp/

https://janeclarejones.com/2018/11/13/the-annals-of-the-terf-wars/

http://academicrightswatch.com/?p=2871

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/canadian-man-claiming-to-be-female-sues-16-women-for-refusing-to-wax-his-ge

Marcus points out that out the "balls-at-12" 5-alpha-reductase people

intersex stats: https://twitter.com/mrkhtake2/status/1063454985147613187

----

unused /r/slatestarcodex comment fodder—

More generally, I'm not sure what to do about the problem of how to _break out_ of the existing Culture War narratives, when you think the reigning narrative is wrong and that you have a better one. The immortal Robin Hanson writes that if you want to make an outsized difference in debates, you sould [pull in a direction that few others are in the high-dimensional policyspace](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html), but I worry that this model overlooks certain difficulties in _marketing_. If you don't want to join the "trans dykes are good and pure; maximize the number of trans people" coalition _or_ the "trans-identified males are bad men; minimize the number of trans people" coalition, the typical reaction is _not_ that people rally around your [third alternative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) in the orthogonal direction, but rather: "Good God you're a fucking unicorn."

Well, I _guess_. But then what's a unicorn to do? I feel _guilty_ about posting too many variants of the same "read [Anne Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html)!" comment whenever trans issues come up in the Culture War thread—it feels too repetitive, too agenda-driven. But _given_ an agenda (people should be aware of the true nature of late-onset gender dysphoria in males so that they can use the knowledge to make better decisions, even if I'm not wise enough to specify in advance what those decisions should be) and wanting to pursue that agenda in good-faith and with an absolute minimum of war,

----

Ideally, the Watsonian and Doylist views should be consilient (social-justice people have a Doylist view of Damore et al. as trying to justify male privilige; Scott Alexander et al. have a Doylist view of social-justice as being about victimhood competition)

deep learning can sex your retina: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-018-0195-0

http://www.womaninterruptedapp.com/en/

https://twitter.com/plantkid_/status/1065016189980721152

https://medium.com/the-establishment/dont-judge-a-girl-for-what-s-between-her-legs-24f6b6c8cc6

how come I've never heard of this Hogancamp guy on Trans Day of Rememberance? oh, right, AGP erasure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marwencol

read later: https://medium.com/@juliaserano/refusing-to-tolerate-intolerance-f24c1bff513f

https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/2012-11-15/online-paedophile-jailed-for-14-years/

http://valleywag.gawker.com/twitter-engineer-dana-mccallum-pled-guilty-to-two-misde-1643207780

https://www.philpercs.com/2016/02/autogynephilia-a-critique-and-personal-narrative.html

https://medium.com/@Betsulimo/i-was-one-of-the-transactivists-on-the-channel-4-documentary-i-regret-what-i-did-this-is-why-7e12350ab6d3

https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/11/30/36431918/if-the-future-is-nonbinary-its-a-bleak-one-for-women

"Obviously I socially gender him as male as per his preference."

"I wouldn't call it a 'preference' exactly."

"I gender him male as per his philosophical commitments"

https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/28/5661118/lab-mice-fear-men-not-women-big-problem-for-science

Mad Ouroboros on the Somewhere Else Discord speculates that "don't call me cis" gendercrits and AFAB enbies are having the same internal gender experience

CAIS in sport: https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1070097483408248835

the evolutionarily ancient process of noticing secondary sex characteristics is less legitimate than "Because I said so"

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/zmynd9/stop-gendering-your-baby?utm_campaign=sharebutton

https://twitter.com/terristrange/status/1068887491812290560

http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/11/the-performance-of-transgender-inclusion/

https://www.afterellen.com/general-news/568221-how-i-became-the-most-hated-lesbian-in-baltimore

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/06/sexism-racism-never-diminishes-even-everyone-becomes-less-sexist-racist.html

https://trialeterror.home.blog/2018/11/25/alternatives-to-transition-a-step-by-step-guide-to-thinking-your-way-out-of-dysphoria-without-repressing-it/

Kinesis on the vibe: https://twitter.com/Kinesis/status/1074361907060957184

------

New from me: ["Trying to Be Explicit"](), a short story that starts out being about the frustration of trying to be objective about a hot-button social issue and facing what one believes to be bad-faith criticism while simultanously acknowledging that _everyone_ thinks their critics are acting in bad faith, but then degenerates into specialized erotica interspersed with commentary on how the details of the erotic fantasy have important implications for the hot-button social issue.

... I don't know, guys. I'm really sorry.

-----

I don't understand why it's so hard to _either_ get the _minimal_ flag out in public, _or_ shut up about all related topics. Obviously, I can't fault anyone for not wanting to put potentially-controversial content under their own name, because I use a pseudonym myself. (I also believe in genetic-ancestry-mediated intelligence differences, and I _don't write about it_.) The problem that I'm trying to rally against is that if _all_ the nice-famous-shiny "rationalists" repeat flawed philosophy in support of the "pro-trans" political coalition (I linked four specific examples in a previous email; it really seems to be the consensus position), and _none_ of them loudly, publicly correct themselves when confronted with better philosophy (because the better philosophy happens to be more easily construed to support the "anti-trans" political coalition), then _we have lost the Mandate of Heaven_.

-----

Duolingo gave me the sentence "Ihre Frau schreibt" ("Her wife/woman writes") and I was very confused for a few moments. ("Well, the mouseover tooltip hint gives 'Her wife' and 'Your wife' as phrase translations, so it has to be 'your wife'—but wait, 'ihre' is similar to 'ihr', which is the plural you-all, so ...")

the MADTv sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgcLfohtFbE

field report on TIMs in lesbian spaces: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9zgivf/peak_trans_viii_tell_your_story_here/ec8zecy/

And like, I share all the same moral ideals (I was born in 1987 and grew up in California; I'm not some [bigoted redneck](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/)).

Yearwood again: https://www.theday.com/article/20170530/SPORT03/170539907

looking through scrollback with "Wilhelm"—

 "Politics Is the Mind; Loyalty to Existing Political Coalitions Is the Mind-Killer"

genuine improvements and noise, and that we should be looking for clever strategies to roll back some of the noise while keeping the good parts

"Wilhelm": "The preliminary results are not good, and they only look good inside a holiness bubble that is going to pop"

I hate you guys so much
I'm making a pointed and deliberate  effort to hate you so that I can continue to learn from you without getting eaten by your egregore

Roissy says that the sum of masculinity and femininity in a relationship must sum to zero, and I can see how putting all of the masculinity in the man and all of the femininity in the woman is kind of useful in that it lets you reap the benefits of comparative advantage
but I don't want to be the guy, and like everyone else, I want my preferences to be high-status, which the status quo is sort of doing for me, albeit in a delusional self-destructive way that I hope is fixable

"Restore patriarchy!" "Never! I mean, I see the point you're trying to make, but the real solution is embryo selection for more nerd girls!"

I hear what you're saying, but, but, without bones of sympathy and approval from feminist women, where am I going to get my bones of approval and sympathy from feminist women?? It's like you're telling me to make fewer paperclips!


"Power that is not aligned with natural law leads to evil, because it requires constantly denying reality and punishing dissenters."
"OK, but I still want my own breasts"

Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)

but I am starting to get a more detailed appreciation of how the thing-that-is-good-that-I-want-to-call-"individualism" has a lot of missing implementation details; "Everyone's self-reported self-identity must be uncritically respected" social norms are trying to maximize a certain kind of individual choice (you not only get to choose your gender, you can even write-in a new one!), but that choice is taking place in the context of a very specific delusional cultural environment that penalizes other kinds of individual choices (like criticizing the delusions)

I'm sad that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because everyone's self-report says it's wrong" to "self-reports are pretty crazy" probably has implication for "Red Pill is probably wrong because everyone's self-report says it's wrong"

when I asked the Licensed Clinical Social Worker how rare I was (wanting to try HRT while loudly denouncing trans ideology as retarded), he said he gets lots of nonbinary/"transfeminine", but had never met anyone who identified as AGP
he wants to talk to the team and have another appt before endocrinologist referal

we should ban identities until we can figure out what's going on

that would require taking power, which is hard

but it's a good thought experiment... if you were appointed Gender Czar, what would you do? This is a rhetorical question, but I think what any decent person with good judgment would do is very, very different from what's happening.

also, it's really personally convenient for me that the delusional identity politics happen to be favorable to my life-defining paraphilia, so I kind of have incentives to play along a bit

as long as you don't describe yourself fully accurately

yeah, it's really annoying, because in addition to my obligately autogynephilic sexuality, I'm also an obligate ultra positivist nerd who doesn't like playing along with cultural narratives that "she" thinks are false
you don't want me as Gender Czar, because I kind of like what's happening (to the extent that we can get away with it without being punished by Gnon), just not how people talk about it
if I get to be Eugenics Czar at the same time, I might be able to make up for it?

You being Gender Czar would be an improvement to what's happening now. I'm not comparing you to my ideal Gender Czar, the thought experiment is that you compare your own judgment to Gender Moloch.
even if you didn't have any power over people, just the ability to give high status public statements would improve the rationality of the general area and shut down some of the holiness spirals occurring

so while you're being successfully marginalized by the currently-reigning egregores, I'm happy to learn some sociology from you NRx guys, because I am an aspiring rationalist, and you have a lot of insights
but if you start gaining power in spaces that I care about, I kind of have to fight you to the death
for her

W: 'Roles require that people support a consistent interface and contracts (in the programming sense). "Identities", "spectrums", "questioning", "finding oneself", and individualism in general break down the contracts and interfaces that others used to be able to rely on. The result is atomization, alienation between genders, and below replacement fertility. It's like a class in a dynamically typed language, where you have no idea what the methods or returned types are.'

unless you have lots of fine-grained roles, "make sure the fence-sitters take the typical route" is really bad for me (screws over everyone who doesn't like the standard role, but isn't weird enough to qualify for a nonstandard one, and statistically, there are a lot more sort-of weird people than really-really weird people)

Yes, exactly: https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1079097805250224130

perceiving sex: https://twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1079334679411675136

"thru a conversation with my sister, I was, for the first time ever, able to distinguish between My Type and My Transition Goals" https://twitter.com/esten/status/1080709264899923968

Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!

I'm saying that the thing that the Zeitgeist is encouraging people to interpret as an atomic identity is almost certainly actually some kind of very specific bug in male sexual psychology that can be interpreted and acted on in various ways! One possible interpretation/action-plan is to split it into two parts: (1) a happy romantic fantasy that I want to indulge somewhat without taking it too far, and (2) a moral responsibility to self-modify at least somewhat in the direction of being more aligned with women (in the sense of AI alignment) even if my volition would naturally be less aligned in the absence of the perceived moral responsibility!

 I agree that I'm being socially disruptive, because I think there are sufficiently serious problems with the current equilibrium of what people are doing, that I've decided to gamble my reputation on staging an intervention! Pretty foolhardy, huh? Well, as evolutionary biologists could tell you, men are all about risk!

 Charity is _not_ about using polite language. Charity is about trying to _see_ what the other motherfucker is doing right!

 misinterpretation of misdirected male sexuality

I agree that a lot of people seem perform the verbal behavior of saying, "A woman is anyone who wants to be!" But like, you know, maybe they're lying!

Human psychology is a very high-dimensional configuration space! If you've bought into an ideology that says that everyone is equal and that therefore psychological sex differences must be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, and when you're locked into that worldview, it does indeed genuinely look to you like individual personality differences swamp sex differences! And when you're locked into that worldview, looking at the dimensions along which the differences are relatively large is genuinely painful! Once you notice this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that makes psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power you gain by letting yourself look at the whole configuration space!

https://arcdigital.media/what-is-gender-identity-10ce0da71999

One way of describing the trigger for me having gone bezerk starting in February is that I'm horrified that my neoreactionary friends are visibly way smarter than my rationalist friends. This is terrible, because kabbalistically, neoreaction is about being evil, and rationality is about being smart. It is written that being smart is more important than being good for humans (because trying to be good typically involves artificially restricting your hypothesis space; if good people don't permit themselves to even consider X, then they'll have trouble modeling a world in which lots of people make their living off X). But I really didn't expect that, in practice, trying to be evil makes you smarter than trying to be smart does!

the oscillation between "I'm embarrassed and upset about {thing} that I don't want to acknowledge or explain, but that makes me not want to acknowledge or explain the fact that I feel embarrassed an upset" vs. "Yes, {thing} is real; real things are allowed to appear on maps"

Goodhart's Lawyer (credit "Wilhelm")

the ugly gray communist 90% crap superstimuli aren't a threat to the values of our ancestors, but the really well done ones, are
I am the threat
(the cartoons with female superheroines that make the AGP male heart melt ... but who are noticeably not drawn from the same distribution as ACTUAL WOMEN)

Taking a sabbatical; I'll try to think of it as being a housewife supported by my past self of the past three years

Siezing the Means of Home Production: http://archive.li/9NRrS

!!Con speakers: I count 1 "they/them" woman, 9 probably-actual-women, 3 known/obvious MtF, and 3 "they/them" men (implied 16 normal men remaining (including me?!))

https://abc30.com/homeless-women-harassed-in-shower-lawsuit-says/3514544/

"Jesse Singal is a transphobic piece of shit!"

Separately, may also be worth considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification … when deciding what merits "piece of shit" status? Who knows if some of the ppl you follow are (e.g.) autogynephilia truthers, but don't write about it under their real name because they see the reaction to Singal?

"That's a suspiciously specific hypothetical."


There were a couple of young black women ahead of me at the convenience store who I found physically attractive; I'm given to understand that there's a whole PUA literature about "day game"  where you talk to random women, and whether you could have an intellectual conversation with them (across that kind of culture and IQ gap) is besides the point?? It's just so unthinkable to me
I'm not claiming that my upbringing got the right answer
Rather, that I'm actually incapable of thinking of other answers independent of rightness
such that I'll never, ever get to hit that
I can barely speak of this to anyone but you (I mean, I could, but I do have you as my designated-evil friend)
one of them was wearing spandex pants
never get to hit that or be that

Every year, the people who are isomorphic in opinions to you become more masculine (because of everyone moving left), which means they are going to have more inferential distance on gender dysphoria.

Contra affirms self-ID: https://twitter.com/ContraPoints/status/1086351168123621376

divorce court required pronouns: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9zgivf/peak_trans_viii_tell_your_story_here/eea6imc/


Maybe blame my father (a Bernie Sanders supporter) for accidentally having a copy of _Atlas Shrugged_ on the family bookshelf where I could get at it when I was sixteen.

a man whose initials are B. D. once wrote, "Ultimately, for me, it comes down to a simple moral question: does my right to have a model that accurately predicts your behavior trump your right to control your own narrative? Because if your narrative doesn't match your behavior, then I have to either doublethink around my own perceptions, or reject your narrative. And which way I choose has consequences." (https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154814383695199?comment_id=10154814575900199&reply_comment_id=10154815175090199&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D)


-----

https://www.scottishathletics.org.uk/42874-2/

https://drethelin.tumblr.com/post/129304925958/gods-actually-exist

----

the analogy my brain came up with is "yes, I understand that we are genetically aimed at protecting and allying with our kin to increase our inclusive genetic fitness, and that this has caused lots of followon effects in human psychology, including in me and my family.  however, please stop calling her my 'fake kid'."

yeah, that's a pretty good analogy
oooh
under this analogy, "nonbinary people who aren't successfully androgynous are less legitimate" seems to map to "interracial adoption is less legitimate"
which
is not the most comfortable bullet to bite
it took a little bit of deliberate effort to do the thing of spontaneously generating the uncomfortable bullet and saying "ooooh" rather than flinching away from it

-----

"I'm not at war with trans _people_; I'm at war with the trans-activism memeplex" is a great motte, but to what extent can you war a culture without hurting the people who are devoting their lives against it? 

 incentivized/selected for self-delusion, which is really unfair to the people who aren't delusional about it
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/technology/amazon-facial-technology-study.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur "Amazon’s system had more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces" Do humans have the same problem?! (it's easier to pass FtM than MtF)


You have some latitude because you have a pony tail and don't come off as a dudebro, so this makes you look ingroup and non-threatening
However, watch out for the zeitgeist shifting to where those signifiers might not be enough in the next few years to get away with as much
I also kind of have breasts?? Does that help???

https://www.kesq.com/news/female-water-polo-players-confronted-by-naked-man-at-palm-springs-swim-center/987276858

woman wanted roller derby as women's space: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9zgivf/peak_trans_viii_tell_your_story_here/eesm1d7/

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/01/is-it-now-a-crime-to-like-a-poem-about-transgenderism/

he/him lesbian also pissed off at trans community: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9zgivf/peak_trans_viii_tell_your_story_here/efo1z6g/

"damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity [...] I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???" (It was a compliment, dummy!!) https://twitter.com/esten/status/1092472430465929216

"what the hell is it gonna take to get you all to stop calling me a dude? like fucking seriously? I'm changing my name, my pronouns have been different for a year and a half, I've been on HRT for 14 months, and a friend just misgendered me" https://twitter.com/esten/status/1098450396102615040

another UK arrest: https://twitter.com/BustedWench/status/1092435717555437569

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/02/why-are-the-police-stopping-a-74-year-old-tweeting-about-transgenderism/

argument seen on Twitter: "transwomen are transwomen" is like "gays can be civil-unioned". Counter: marriage is wholly socially-constructed, but biological sex is real

"ffs I'm legally practicing ...": https://twitter.com/FeministRoar/status/1092850802299936768 (patient doesn't care about legal fiction)

https://medium.com/@JonnnyBest/the-truth-about-michigan-womyns-festival-and-trans-women-a-correction-899d8e49f655

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arrested-children-calling-transgender-woman-man.html

https://twitter.com/Scientific_Bird/status/1089265017969668097

Is the OP deleted? https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/23piReu6vmfskHyh7/dragon-army-theory-and-charter-30min-read

http://thefutureprimaeval.tumblr.com/post/156517718308/you-may-not-be-interested-in-politics-but

https://twitter.com/Indy_Leya/status/1095257325118648320

"Trying to Be Exp": mention how we don't have shared language to describe what orgasm feels like

there's a problem where if what you actually believe is extremely nuanced, and in some contexts you say something shorter and "punchier" (that's pushing back against a local majority: see "All Debates Are Bravery Debates"), people will ever-so-slightly misinterpret the punchier version and say, "Ah-ha!" like, I'm not _intending_ to motte-and-bailey, but _something_ has to get lost between the 5000-word nuanced version and the version that fits in a Tweet, and I'm sorry that the Tweet version is bailey-like

one woman's precautions against men: https://twitter.com/editingemily/status/1095853582346141697

telling the only woman in a karoke group: you're our only female vocalist, you should sing this part. I wouldn't say that if there was a trans woman in the room; it's a trivial example, but life is composed of these little things

https://www.clearerthinking.org/single-post/2019/02/13/Is-language-influencing-your-beliefs-in-ways-you-dont-realize

re "All Debates Are Bravery Debates": the G. Mitchell "Human Sex Differences" book phrases things in a weird way

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/local/fife/819644/mum-of-supermarket-toilet-sex-assault-victim-warns-freed-attacker-could-strike-again/

Falsehood implies anything! https://twitter.com/Nespresso821/status/1097295455170555904

https://twitter.com/every_lesbian/status/1097649372752461824

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2019/02/the-vagina-monologues-a-feminist-production-with-a-necessary-asterisk

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-02-18/transgender-hormone-therapy-could-pose-heart-dangers I'm glad they at least named the journal (Circulation, Feb 18), but I wish they also included the article title for quick search

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/transgender-insanity-police-now-jailing-people-for-laughing-at-men-in-women
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/man-who-says-hes-female-enters-womens-bathroom-sexually-assaults-10-year-ol

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xnwed/facial-recognition-software-regularly-misgenders-trans-people

https://web.archive.org/web/20190222094427/https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/

more obvious AGP: https://twitter.com/Azure_Husky/status/1100865940986703880

https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/180522920951/tumblr-is-brainwashing-a-generation-of-autistic

"Got a job interview for a coffee shop. I look like I could be the hot lesbian barista, right?" https://twitter.com/isbeisbeisbe/status/1104007825116811264 But, but "hot lesbian" seems like the kind of thing men who objectify lesbians say, not actual lesbians—not with Probability One, but in balance

more self-gaslighting: "it's because i've actually done the work in my head to internalize that they're not men." https://twitter.com/Anarcho_Vampire/status/1104607455466545152

The end of this comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/azpeio/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_11_2019/eibaawa/) makes me think that Loury's adverse-selection mechanism also applies here: "Only hateful people express doubt that group differences are caused by self-fulfilling prophecies" is a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Moldbug being less-racist: https://web.archive.org/web/20170720053316/https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/thanks-ian-this-conversation-has-only-gotten-more-civil-c5d1414ac817

'saying that there are “TRUE trans people” and “mistaken cis people” is like saying there are “people who are biologically MEANT to have tattoos” and “people who THOUGHT they wanted tattoos”.' https://twitter.com/trialeterror/status/1100407836419346433

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8647171/transgender-woman-sexually-assaulted-girl-morrisons/

Cohen's d visualizer! https://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/

When I say "I like you a lot" to Jessica, it's a weird interaction between "I'm in love with her because I'm modeling her as an actual woman", but "I'm less afraid of hurting her"—being that forward to a cis woman would be creepy. Notice how strongly Sarah reacted to the counterfactual marriage proposal.

http://loyolaphoenix.com/2019/03/menstrual-products-in-luc-bathrooms-disappearing-and-tampered-with/

a FB acquaintance writes: "!!! someone finally messaged me a graphic fantasy of raping me, completely unprompted! I'm a real woman now!" And then, in the comments: "don't be sad! it was hot"

a FB acquaintance writes: "I mean.. there was a time in my life when I had a single token cis friend, and I was very happy with that situation. [...] I certainly am tempted to go back to a mostly trans-exclusive social life, even if there's still some misunderstanding of my gender in that situation." (Wow, that's pretty cultish!!)

https://sportsscientists.com/2019/03/on-transgender-athletes-and-performance-advantages/

AGP/furry combo comic: https://twitter.com/WolFirry/status/1110259481479467010

read this: https://medium.com/@kemenatan

biological sex denialism https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/opinion/trans-women-feminism.html

Contrapoints peak: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9zgivf/peak_trans_viii_tell_your_story_here/ek0a1qv/
Harassment peak: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/9zgivf/peak_trans_viii_tell_your_story_here/ek0wehg/

https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/comments/bb27gx/i_didnt_get_an_erection_when_putting_on_a_ball/

"According to our newsgathering partners at the News and Tribune, Brown asked managers, 'How do you know I'm not a female?'" https://www.wthr.com/article/clark-county-man-arrested-sexually-assault-woman-walmart-bathroom

https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/04/11/234-house-democrats-2-republicans-co-sponsor-bill-forcing-schools-to-let-male-athletes-compete-on-girls-sports-teams/
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/1006/text

How do you know it wasn't just a straight friendship?? https://stevenuniversallyreviews.tumblr.com/post/184181025733/episode-108-future-boy-zoltron

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/04/lack-of-black-doctoral-students/587413/

a Facebook acquaintance (who didn't pass very well when we met in October): 'Of course, those of you who know me on other platforms see me being very lesbian every day, to such a degree that I have been described as "the community gay"'

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/12/radical-feminist-warned-refer-transgender-defendant-assault/

"yeah in public we say 'cis women' but tran to tran we just say 'women,' we‘re not insane lol"
no transsexual is like 'from a young age all i ever wanted was to be.. cis'
https://twitter.com/theorygurl/status/1062451652836446208

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/bhulic/i_cant_do_this_any_more_i_need_to_divorce_my/

thanks for the marketing advice! I should _definitely_ take that into account if I ever decide to put more effort into "persuading people", which sounds like something that an aspiring instrumental rationalist would care about. Perhaps unfortunately, however, I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist: all I can do is try to communicate what I actually think and feel using clear language (and standard rhetorical techniques like sarcasm, satire, &c. that people know how to interpret even if they wouldn't be clear if someone naïvely took the words literally). If other people aren't persuaded by this ... maybe they _shouldn't_ be! Maybe I can live with that!

You _can't_ optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you _can't_ optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."

I guess I can't argue with that, but I wish I knew what happened to my wallet

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/ray-blanchard-transgender-orthodoxy/

circle game paranoia: http://www.unz.com/isteve/bad-juju-in-oak-park-il/

https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9

https://arcdigital.media/on-transwomen-and-sports-54fe1a8963e

https://medium.com/@katieja/young-children-reality-sex-and-gender-3421f4f165f1

https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/

"please like think before you go around using “afab” or “amab” to refer broadly to groups of people in your tweets. neither of these categories are like coherent social categories in any way, and are often used in ways that perpetuate trans misogyny" https://twitter.com/folkpunkjunk/status/1140278990072102912

https://medium.com/@aytchellis/talking-past-each-other-about-trans-gender-1da8e058caf8

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/teen-17-who-sparked-row-for-saying-there-are-only-two-genders-suspended-from-school-for-three-weeks-a4173736.html


"> Yet somehow a lot of people seem to think they can throw away basic ration
ality 101 as soon as their inside view tells them they're on to something.\n\nI think we (\"we\") sh
ould encourage some degree of cognitive division of labor rather than assuming a unified, consensus-
driven rationality community. If your inside view tells you that you're really on to something and y
et \"everyone else\" seems to think you're crazy, that's a _really interesting_ learning opportunity for _someone_! Maybe you _should_ go off on your own and explore that thing really hard for a while, build your own models, and then come back later and try to sell the rest of the community on what you think you've learned. Certainly, this is a high-risk bet (most of the time, \"everyone else\" is correct and the contrarian will end up having wasted years of her life on something useless and crazy), but sometimes, those pay off!

            "comment": "Sophia\n\n> Why do you refer to mutual attempts to replace others' narratives as a zero-sum game?\n\nNew guess: because I'm incredibly prone to inventing spurious conservation laws when I get upset. Last time it was conservation of happiness/suffering (http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/religious/); this time, it's ... um, more complicated.",


 "> I am curious though, when you have the belief that you are being programmed by your phone, are you capable of evaluating how probable that is?\n\n... it's complicated. I _still_ have this vague, intuitive sense that it would be useful to compare the variation in my behavior that's explained by variation in phone notifications with the variation in the phone's behavior that's explained by me, but I don't know how to make this more precise (and I'm being far more precise/lucid/non-delusional about it now than I was at the time)."

"I mean, another part of it is that \"homophobia\" isn't going to be a natural category in human psychology. Suppose the personality trait is actually \"risk aversion with respect to social change.\" This could manifest as \"homophobia\" for people who grew up before _Obergefell v. Hodges_, but something completely different for people growing up today.",

comment": "Protip: \"Have you ever thought of harming yourself?\" is actually code for \"Are you stupid enough to answer 'Yes' to this question so that I can imprison you in order to create the illusion that my job is useful and extract thousands of dollars from your health insurance company?\"",

"Suppose political coalition C is promoting ideas P and Q, and I agree with P, but Q seems really really REALLY bad. When speaking as an individual about my ideas with people who understand ideas, I definitely want to be specific and just say \"P is good, but Q is very bad,\" without saying anything for or against either coalition C or its rival coalition D. But insofar as most people don't have the spare cognitive capacity to separate P and Q, and instead just think of people as \"one of the Cs\" or \"one of the Ds\", I might want to avoid phrasing things in a way that people would construe as support for C. Because Q is _just that bad_."

Elizabeth, for that matter, one wonders how many trans people have ever seen a Muslim in real life and vice versa. If more of them had, maybe these groups wouldn't be in the same coalition!",

"I agree with Kara that social-justice folk find it useful to model alt-right folks as politically profiting from being debated at all. But likewise, alt-right folks find it useful to model social-justice folks as politically profiting from shutting down debate. These elementary game-theoretic observations, while correct, don't help us decide which laws and cultural norms will have which consequences.\n\nI suspect a lot of people who don't consider themselves competent to evaluate consequences might want to strategically support whichever coalition currently happens to support more open debate (because of reasons: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/an-intuition-on-the-bayes-structural-justification-for-free-speech-norms/), and then switch sides when that coalition becomes too powerful and starts trying to silence _its_ enemies. However, when evaluating this suggestion of mine, you should take into account that I have an ulterior motive for getting people to oppose the social-justice coalition, which I am at war with for my own personal reasons."

"Really sorry if this sounds rude! This is literally just how I talk now!"

"If you think you're smart enough to optimize the universe all by yourself, sure. I'm not that smart! I want to join coalitions that reward their members for being transparent, because I predict that gangs of monkeys that divide up the last banana using program equilibrium will outcompete gangs of monkeys that sell the last banana in a second-price auction, who will in turn outcompete gangs of monkeys that literally fight over the banana."

 "On the other hand, \"software to tell if someone is actually more emotionally distraught than you might think\" is pretty cool as a machine-learning/statistics trick! I wonder what interventions could incentivize Facebook to just publish the model so that people could learn from it _without_ subjecting us to a future of the Facebook Community Operations Team stamping on a human face forever??"

"Come to think of it, I actually expect the \"suppressing speech fuels conspiracy theories\" effect is _justified_ in a Bayesian sense: if the fraction of hypotheses-that-people-want-to-ban that are true is higher than the fraction of hypotheses-in-general that are true, the fact that a lot people want to ban a hypothesis is probabilistic evidence that it's true.

"Given that English has gendered personal pronouns and it's not feasible to redesign the English language to change this, marking babies in some way to indicate their biological sex (with clothing color, or perhaps by gluing something to them) can be a useful social technology, because it allows people to just say, \"She's such a good baby!\" without having to ask about the baby's sex. Now, obviously, we don't want to indoctrinate innocent babies into oppressive gender roles that might not be a good fit for them, and I agree that gendered clothing increases our risk of falling into this well-trodden failure mode. But maybe there's some way for smart people who understand the problem in sufficient detail to avoid that failure mode, without becoming pawns in a memetic war against \"noticing that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept.\""

laim that the cultural presumption that anything bad that happens to trans people (like losing a job) is probably due to discrimination and transphobia is actually bad for trans people in the long run, because it incentivizes other members of society to treat trans people like inherently fragile designated victims (to be avoided if possible and coddled if not possible), rather than just ordinary people who happen to be trans\u00e2\u0080\u0094if you were a business owner, you wouldn't want to hire someone who you couldn't fire without fearing a lawsuit, and if you can't not-hire them without also fearing a lawsuit, conveniently happening to lose their resume starts looking like a good life strategy! You can't outlaw Bayesian reasoning and feedback mechanisms! I understand why it's tempting to think that you can, but don't hate the player; hate the game-theoretic nature of all life!",

 people treat an organisation with more respect and status than simply bunch of people\n\nYes, exactly! This is an exciting arbitrage opportunity for agents who care less about respect and status (in the eyes of people who respect institutions; they may care about an alternative gray/black market of respect and status), and more about Doing Things That Make Sense Even If That's Not the Way Things Are Done Around Here.",

"I think sufficiently self-aware, sufficiently prosocial narcissists and sociopaths deserve love! I hope I don't have any ulterior motives for saying this! (I don't _think_ I'm a narcissist or a sociopath, but people can have false beliefs about themselves.)",

My personal paraphrase of the common theme in this and other \"What were they thinking??\" thinkpieces is: \"Defecting against the victimhood identity politics mind-virus is more important than whichever schmuck happens to be President\". I live in non-swing-state California and voted for Gary Johnson, but I actually agree with this now, if only because I'm terrified that the victimhood identity politics mind-virus is trying to eat the next generation of people like me and no one else seems to care, to the extent that I had a delusional nervous breakdown and spent three miserable days in a psychiatric hospital, which three days could have been longer if it weren't for my quick wit (specifically, the ability, when feeling threatened, to use verbal skills to manipulate social reality rather than describe actual reality), the fact that the other patients/inmates knew the security code, and Michael Vassar's willingness to pretend to be a doctor.\n\nI'm sorry to keep telling this story over and over, but this is analogous to a religious conversion experience (I want people to explicitly engineer social technologies that provide the good parts of traditional religions and institutions, but more fun and without the lies: http://lesswrong.com/lw/5t/can_humanism_match_religions_output/), and I don't have any practice being a missionary! Please bear with me!"

who should be classified as having the Bad Man property and therefore be excluded from coalitions!


 thanks for the marketing advice! I should _definitely_ take that into account if I ever decide to put more effort into \"persuading people\", which sounds like something that an aspiring instrumental rationalist would care about. Perhaps unfortunately, however, I'm an aspiring epistemic rationalist: all I can do is try to communicate what I actually think and feel using clear language (and standard rhetorical techniques like sarcasm, satire, &c. that people know how to interpret even if they wouldn't be clear if someone na\u00c3\u00afvely took the words literally). If other people aren't persuaded by this ... maybe they _shouldn't_ be! Maybe I can live with that!"


I _really, really_ don't want to participate in an oppression Olympics; I think it would be _really really bad_ to try to settle social-norms disputes with a competition to see which coalition can rack up more probabilistic suicides. (Just think about what incentives that creates!) But for the people who _are_ going to make decisions on the basis of probabilistic suicides _anyway_, surely my suffering deserves to be counted, too?

True male side/true female side: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj

policing: "we definitely expect better models of gender out of you": https://twitter.com/atax1a/status/1157066530028265473

I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)—we can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")

older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers [similarly frown on](https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) mentioning race when it's not relevant.)

My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike understanding of objective reality and optimizing the hell out of it" rather than "playing mind games on each other to make it artificially harder to notice that we don't actually live in a Total Morphological Freedom tech regime."


"Had I not transitioned, I would fear the power you have over me, and remain silent." https://aria.dog/support-all-your-friends/


https://www.reddit.com/r/ftm/comments/cqplrh/how_do_yall_cope_in_mixed_trans_spaces/

Raven is cosplayed more than any other Teen Titan

[thousand-dollar ultra-realistic mask](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGTKL9LokHg (wait for the reveal at 0:44!)

colorful sandals

even my post-redpill intuitions endorse something like "White people can't be racist" and "Men can't be sexist", but rather than "-ism is power plus privilege", the rationale is "We're thick-skinned and have better things to do than play victimhood politics"


 I thought it should be acceptable for someone to send one final "OK, sorry" message in response to being told to stop contacting someone
where I feel like my position is analogous to Scott Aaronson's complaint about his police encounter: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3903 , that people who are in the process of complying should be treated with good faith; you don't want the cops to shoot unarmed men and defend themselves on the grounds of, "Well, he wasn't complying fast enough"

that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses

"Every year, the people who are isomorphic in opinions to you become more masculine (because of everyone moving left), which means they are going to have more inferential distance on gender dysphoria."

you can get away with a lot when you read as a lefty? At hack day, someone said they read about Pinterest's skin-tone debiaser tech being thrown out because it drew on very old papers by a EUGENICIST (article turned out to be https://www.wired.com/story/pinterest-skin-tone-search/ ), and I was like, Oh, interesting, so what was wrong with the research? That got an incredulous stare: "You mean, what's wrong with eugenics??!" And I'm like, no, that's not what I mean, I'm curious about the specfiic technical flaw, which is distinct from the author's odious views
and then someone else related an anecdote about JPEG being racist (because the standard was defined to match old chemical photography, which was optimized for pictures of white people), which is the kind of legit answer I was looking for, to which I could respond with a proggy "Wooooooow"
I know how to pronounce "shibboleth" correctly
almost wish I had been brave enough to go for "It depends on what you mean by 'eugenics'; embryo selection looks super exciting" (the last time I said this in public, at my old company's holiday party the other year, I got a fair amount of horrified disbelief)

the conjunction of (a) Katie Cohen getting beaten up by the police and dragged to psychiatric prison, (b) the Linux Contributor Covenant thing, and (c) the Brett Cavanagh thing has restored my "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must"-sight, which may prove instrumentally useful for doing social science

Kavanagh outgroup-male Till

the Gods of the Copybook Headings might call it cuckoldry, but I call it Practice

(I should confess that while part of the joy of hearing non-Berkeley-2018 views is the intellectual profit of engaging with ideas, a possibly-larger part is just relief at being able to punch right for once, now that I spend most of my time these days punching left)


my insufficiently requited love "Beatrice" retweeted this: https://twitter.com/whodamanny/status/1045409509546446848

whatever actually happened in that interview is less interesting than the fact that Manny thinks this makes him look good. The candidate ... raised his voice? That's it??

But if I find this kind of thing baffling/annoying rather than outrageous, is that an inherent men-don't-play-victimhood-politics asymmetry, or is it just because I know outrage is not a winning move in the contingent environment of Berkeley 2018? (Contrast to black men feeling outraged at having security called on them friviously)

my writing is not doing much on this front, because even if I don't get ostracized, people are just like, "Oh, Zack, he writes weird transphobic stuff but is otherwise OK" whereas people actually like and publicly-praise and listen to [...]

there might be a lot of AGP-transitioners in the win condition
just not the kind that enter women's bike races and gloat about it

(I would still be at war with it if I thought I could win; unfortunately, Mother Nature has the big guns)

Chesterson has many fences on his property
I like the second-wave "Free to Be You and Me" space where you loudly insist that girls can do anything, but don't pretend that biological sex is fake, which is past some of the fences (quite a lot of them, really), but not as far as Berkeley 2018

what I would really love to see in the open-source world is opposition to the trans agenda, from women, on radical feminist grounds
but ... you know, there aren't very many women around to begin with

I wonder what would have happened if Kavanaugh had been AGP and transitioned ten years ago, but all the other facts of the case were the same


there's also the phenomenon of people who are aggressively SJWish also being noticeably not familiar about the position/community they're defending as detectible by shibboleth usage (someone I had a long back-and-forth on /r/slatestarcodex had never heard the term "deadnaming" before; tech guy with "he/him" in his bio spells "transwoman" as one word)
(I spell "trans woman" as two words not because I believe the "it's just an adjective for a kind of woman" bullshit, but I know the shibboleths and so does my audience)
but you never had to go to seminary to be offended by blasphemy

psychology note about the Quillette meetup: I felt really uncomfortable with how the organizer (an older white man) wanted to talk about the dysfunctionality of black communities, not because I expected to disagree too much, but because he didn't make an effort to signal that he had a non-racial-animus-motivated reason to be interested in the topic (contrast this to how I constantly mention "I was on HRT for five months" during my campaign; I need to say that to show that I have skin in the game)
Yeah, that seems a bit edgy for Quillette
That guy was probably in cognitive dissonance and feeling the need to test the waters
I felt especially awkward being at a table with him in public in the context of the black waitress complementing me on my Steven Universe T-shirt five minutes earlier

I guess I see your point that if I can't trust these clowns to even put a "social trust" term into their utilitarian pseudo-calculation for open bathrooms, then I shouldn't trust them on open borders, either

https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/comments/cp1tap/gender_euphoria_genital_engorgement_whats_the/

https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/

I'm imagining that there's some margin at which the shame and intimidation is counterbalanced by E pur si muove concerns. (Conditional on the hypothesis that, in fact, e pur si muove.)

http://www.trans.cafe/posts/2016/6/27/17-signs-i-was-transgender-but-didnt-know-it

https://medium.com/@transstyleguide/alternatives-to-afab-and-amab-d7cf8fe20a72

There are Facts About Males that neurotypicals probably don't explain in words? Something about how a gentleman who doesn't want to be more specific, if he were going to be more specific, might end up using the word curvature. But maybe I've already said too much.
 
support group can't mention anatomy: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/bripts/peak_trans_ix_tell_your_story_here/f6wjry3/

https://www.lipstickalley.com/threads/transwomen-in-my-ptsd-group-and-performing-femininity.1004483/

Damore new job: https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849

https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/comments/d54b7x/thank_you_and_goodbye/

"Genuine question: Are there any straight transitioned women out there? Who weren’t previously gay?" https://twitter.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1204773053986725889

https://twitter.com/LaraAdamsMille1/status/1199132705478381568

-----

If someone wants to rewrite this post because they can do a better job of it (perhaps, as Jim suggests, because the post has objective flaws that are causually related to the author's crimes), that's great.

If someone wants to re-write the post because we want to use the idea but it would be embarrassing to give the author credit for it, that's just PR-driven plagiarism. And I don't think it would even work.

Suppose we include "Affordance Widths" in the Best-of-2018 collection as-is. If /r/SneerClub gets word of it, they'll point and sneer and say, "Look, the robot cult blog just canonized a post by a rapist! What terrible people they are!"

Suppose we get someone to re-write the post because of the reputational risk. If /r/SneerClub gets word of it, they'll point to this discussion and sneer and say, "The robot cult blog rewrote a post because they're worried about reputational risks. But the fact that their rationale was 'reputational risks' suggests that they don't know that rape is wrong. What terrible people they are!"

And they would kind of have a point? The function of "bad reputation" is to correspond to things that are actually bad.

-----

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/12/childrens-transgender-clinic-hit-35-resignations-three-years/

'someone saying they're MtF is like waving a big red flag in front of me that says, "I will try to seduce you in the creepiest way, talk your ear off about model trains, and violate your boundaries with my fetishes."' https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/faj48v9/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/eacgc5/a_tim_in_healthcare/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/eab3wy/relieved_to_see_a_woman/

TW/TERF rape fantasy https://twitter.com/LaraAdamsMille1/status/1209258661769621506

peeling back another layer of the onion of algorithmic bad faith, "Why are you being so nice to me here?! I obviously don't deserve it!" was pretty performative on my part (not because I was consciously putting on an act, but in the sense that all human social behavior is an act), a socio-psychological "immune response" developed in response to a tendency I perceive for people to collude to be nice to each other (pretending to agree with whoever they're currently talking to) rather than coordinating to produce shared maps. So in contrast to the usual pattern of people optimizing their speech to deflect blame from themselves, I put on a show of allocating blame to (my past) self to signal that I care about Justice (people being blamed the correct amount), even when that amount of blame would be unjust if someone else were doing it rather than it being performative social self-injury. I HOPE this comment makes sense, but let me know if it instead reads as illegible Vassarian moonspeak.

"Telling soldiers in a war that their bullets are destroying valuable human knowledge is not hard to understand - but they often won't respond the way you'd hope." https://twitter.com/ben_r_hoffman/status/1122953098761330692

"Being misgendered means that how you saw yourself, just a woman casually discussing a TV show or a movie, suddenly gets stripped away and replaced with "...but of course we know you're really a man." It’s nightmarish.

It means that all of the other people who have been saying 'she' might have been just 'playing along.'" well, yes

 https://byrslf.co/i-wasnt-annoyed-at-your-misgendering-me-b13cd9480b2c

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

Yglasis's mask slips: https://archive.md/jf7ur

bronies: https://twitter.com/TransSalamander/status/1045911272670339072

https://feminina.eu/2017/10/24/why-blanchardians-are-scientifically-unsound-and-no-its-not-because-activists-hate-them/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/feycktw/

https://twitter.com/kittypurrzog/status/1220842510248886272

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/01/24/42658513/seattle-school-board-takes-steps-to-dismantle-gifted-program

"For goodness sake, I mean your pronouns are on your damned jacket!" https://twitter.com/BrieCayne/status/1221212541977800704

academic freedom on campus: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-university-of-washington-should-not.html

https://www.unz.com/isteve/post-gay-marriage-cont/

"Dodging learning people's deadnames like some sort of willfully ignorant ninja." https://twitter.com/yaahc_/status/1222542847322099713

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/it-must-be-said/

the people you're afraid of aren't going to read a blog whose URL is _unremediatedgender.space_

[Felix Conrad](http://transcendmovement.com/felix-conrad-confesses-that-he-secretly-believes-in-autogynephilia/)—

[link is dead, but it's allegedly in his Kindle book]

> Imagine the following scenario: a researcher discovers that one ethnic group has a lower IQ than another and that the cause is genetic–not educational. In my opinion that research is as dangerous as a toxic virus and I’d wipe any hard drive that contained such research. That is intellectual integrity in my opinion. 

Protip: you don't have to preemptively commit suicide! Wait for other people to kill you instead! (Desired privacy settings for this update: people smart enough to understand metaphors.)

"how did you realize you were non-binary": https://twitter.com/QueerGirlEmilie/status/1225517017035350016

religious affiliation is shared environment https://twitter.com/ent3c/status/1161717179802443778

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/f1nedr/tims_bragging_in_female_weight_lifting_subs/

during a Feb 2020 discussion of salary transparency: "For those of you telling me I make too much: [...] I'm one of the top women in my role." https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1228528673726140416  She transitioned in May 2018!! (https://blog.thea.codes/i-am-thea) Last year's taxable income: $360k https://twitter.com/theavalkyrie/status/1228457455350235137 

> prairie dogs are not a type of dog and guinea pigs are not a type of pig https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/f4dmsf/all_for_those_who_find_the_term_cis_offensive_how/fhqah6k/

> The function of 'trans' in that term is to indicate that they're not actually a type of woman.
>
> Compare: counterfeit money, toy gun, soy milk, glass pearls, veggie meat, faux fur https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/f4dmsf/all_for_those_who_find_the_term_cis_offensive_how/fhpxjx0/

"privative adjective": http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/Fake/fakeguns.htm

> Long story short, I was pro-trans until I had exposure to actual trans people. Then the wrongthink started creeping in: wow, this looks an awful lot like a social contagion and wow, this looks an awful lot like a homophobic fetish and wow, this looks an awful lot like lesbian self-erasure and wow, this looks an awful lot like a protracted exercise in medically-assisted self harm. https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/f1finv/formerly_qt_supporters_who_are_now_gc_what_made/fh5tzj5/

> being a trans woman is 10% war on hair & 90% coming to terms w the fact that wanting tits ultimately led to u joining an anti nazi coalition
https://twitter.com/avaavita/status/908416401312018433

http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcbiopolitics2.htm

selection effect: "TERFs never pass" https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/emgk0t/to_qt_a_solution_to_trans_in_sports/fdyj2wl/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/female-prisoner-takes-government-to-court-after-alleged-assault-by-transgender-inmate-n5wtg2nf7

https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/comments/e8qa7x/im_just_scared_that_if_i_cum_ill_think_im_not/

> If you are angry or think it's "unfair" for a trans girl to beat a cis girl in a sporting event then fundamentally you don’t think trans girls are "real" girls. It’s that simple. [Bullet-biters in both camps agree!] https://twitter.com/chasestrangio/status/1229407118119391234

> Never mind that, for instance, a recent employment tribunal decision in the UK directly contradicts them by stating that an absolutist belief in immutable and binary sex is incompatible with the human dignity and rights of others.  https://medium.com/@KatjaT/a-pinch-of-expertise-plus-a-ton-of-speculation-a85684120160

nostalgia: https://queersingularity.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/with-regards-to-the-gender-question-i-advise-feminist-revolution/

-----

but notably, the debate is "played-out" _not_ because anyone has pinned down a decisive flaw in my _extremely modest_ core philosophical claims (which do _not_ immediately imply any particular policy position about trans issues, but would be _relevant_ for _figuring out_ the optimal social policy, which I explicitly claim not to have done), but because I'm thinking sufficiently outside of the _Zeitgeist_ that I can't be allowed to win arguments in public—"They will form a united front and gaslight you," as Ziz put it (<https://sinceriously.fyi/social-reality/>)

_Extremely modest_ core claim: cognitively useful categories need non-circular truth conditions that make predictions about many observations (meta-level version: <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries>, object-level version: <http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/>); the only serious reason _not_ to do this is to make coordination earlier (meta-level version: <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests>, object-level version: <http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/>), but "this shared category makes coordination easier" is a _very different_ rationale from "this shared category makes people happier directly", which I claim is "wireheading" from an AI-design perspective, and you would expect a different _rationale_ to imply different decisions even in advance of having worked out exactly what those decisions should be

I sometimes get sloppy and angry in real-time discussions (I'm a _lot_ smarter in asynchronous media) in a way that I often regret, but I think it should be sympathetic and understandable that it would be extremely frustrating when you put in a _lot_ of work over _many_ months spelling all this out at the length of many thousands of words, _and_ responding to critics (<http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/ozy/>), and discovering that it mostly just ... doesn't matter, because the _Zeitgeist_ is just not responsive to careful philosophical arguments

okay, I still need to write another multi-thousand word post (again, probably two posts) explaining the "wireheading" claim

_that's_ probably my problem; I need to write two more blog posts

then, everyone will understand

-----

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SqNvmwDxRibLXjMZN/and-say-no-more-of-it
> Anything done with an ulterior motive has to be done with a pure heart. 

-----

smart fascism—
> Cops don't spend a lot of resources prioritizing "drugs" as such. They face political pressure to deal with violence and property crime, which has clear intersections with drug activity. They'll use drug charges opportunistically to deal with people they want to get off the street, but the bulk of police activity is stuff I want to see enforced, against people I want to see incarcerated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/f6zuip/whats_the_most_controversial_opinion_that_you/fi90y07/
> city administrations and law enforcement see things like minor drug charges as a way to harass people they want off the street for other reasons
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/f6zuip/whats_the_most_controversial_opinion_that_you/fibxyxl/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/f7sn2o/no_matter_how_feminine_they_want_to_pose_the_most/

> the social justice mentality being as much a regular expression search as it is an ideology
https://twitter.com/GabrielRossman/status/1229461398247198720

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NiceJobBreakingItHero is a religious deconversion trope

----

A mother I know jokes—

> I'm gonna go ahead and buy underwear
> does he happen to have a preference between briefs or boxer briefs
> why is underwear so gender
> "what's in your pants"  "gender"  "but -" "bought some gender off  amazon"

But, flies are actually functional.

---

in "memetics"/"social-control monkey warfare" world, there is no progresss; there is no citations; people just have the same argument over and over again, and whichever egregore has the most bodies and the most volume steamrolls the opposition into accepting their version of social reality


https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/dxtgh7/qt_do_you_encourage_other_trans_redditors_to_come/f7wng98/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/filh1fn/


https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689
> For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.

> While a limited form of selection in humans is acceptable—for example, preventing a couple who are carriers of a recessive genetic defect or disease from producing an offspring with that condition—the kind of wholesale and directed selective breeding of humans suggested by the word “eugenics” is immoral, and I don’t favor it at all.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/discovery-institute-makes-hay-of-dawkins-tweet-and-a-geneticist-mistakenly-says-that-artificial-selection-wont-work-in-humans/

> I hold eugenics to be completely immoral and we should not attempt to implement it.
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1229890352275955713

> "We must be guided by solidarity, not stigma," the director general of the World Health Organization warned on Saturday. "The greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other."
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1229832977472946184
https://archive.is/1pQ4p

https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1230577418559270913

coronavirus, Elizabeth Warren

https://quillette.com/2020/02/02/i-may-have-gender-dysphoria-but-i-still-prefer-to-base-my-life-on-biology-not-fantasy/

> Trans athletes are not a threat. We need to protect trans kids—and all LGBTQ+ kids—and ensure they feel safe and welcomed at school. I urge the Arizona legislature to reject this cruel bill.

get ahead on perscriptions

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26714

> It is easier to work in the service industry than to live as a trans woman who can't pass.
https://twitter.com/GlamDamorous/status/1231985917633548305

https://medium.com/@evakurilova/what-a-chinese-idiom-tells-us-about-gender-identity-ideology-91261e985d3c

https://twitter.com/MxBdUnicorn/status/1232169845011165184 "Hey cis ladies can you not?" (But if you were actually trying to be a woman, you'd be _interested_ in what they actually think, right?!)

https://twitter.com/steve_shives/status/1233419627033694209
https://archive.is/bqvvx
> She wasn't complaining about cis men being allowed in a women's shelter. She was complaining about trans women being allowed in a women's shelter.

Masterful obfuscation: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ER6TomCW4AIfoNG?format=jpg&name=large

Eric Raymond gets ousted from his own organization: http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-February/thread.html

https://medium.com/@kemenatan/its-just-a-fetish-right-91cb0a4e261
https://archive.is/AAyxt

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ER8fXJcXkAIn8G9?format=jpg&name=large


> the people who produce the sort of media which fulfills the demand are themselves socio-demographically exactly like affluent white liberals (to give credit to Ta-Nehisi Coates, he is the exception). Ask yourself, when was the last time you read an op-ed or think-piece from an Indian convenience store clerk or a Bangladeshi cab driver? Almost always the op-eds and think-pieces come from professionals who likely experience the least "macro" aggression and the most "micro" aggression, and, who can speak the language of affluent white liberals and know exactly how to say the correct things
> No working-class person says "white presenting." No immigrant says "white presenting." I have had friends in academia tell me that my children "present as white."
https://www.brownpundits.com/2020/03/01/the-white-acting-mother-of-a-white-presenting-daughter/

Vassar—
> I sometimes say we need 'quantum witch-hunts' where we assess the 'witch quantum number' of a social interaction without declaring anyone to be a witch (because witchcraft is an enactive process, not something associated with individuals)

Bar chart of sex diffs: https://twitter.com/jurijfedorov/status/1225214491744489474

https://twitter.com/NateTreme/status/1234980122727288834

Inheritance of consensus: https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/8/1/the-cause-of-illness

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/03/04/i-was-cancelled-for-my-tweets-on-transgenderism/

California sex-ed curriculum: https://twitter.com/PeavyPosy/status/1235342626502647809

hear this being thrown around: https://twitter.com/LaraAdamsMille1/status/1235391042406490114

disanalogy of cis/trans to gay/straight: https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/1235623170339672065

"this is the existence the people that want me to be trans want for me" https://twitter.com/0xCAFEBEEF/status/1235595792481570816

NRx koans: https://archive.is/rFDZA

This is actually a pretty clear example of no-win prejudice: https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/fe9rp8/asking_if_its_okay_to_join_a_sub_when_you_are_not/ (if asked, assumed to be seeking validation—but what if they were actually trying to respect the boundary?)

http://web.archive.org/web/20120717073425/http://www.james-g.com/

You know, when a random Twitter person does it, it doesn't bother me much: https://twitter.com/ericlinuskaplan/status/1236740431427203073 It's specifically when it's impinging on rationalist-land that I'm at war.

The motte-and-bailey: https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1236894909547724800

alleged gender dysphoria from cis ppl taking hormones? read later (I doubt) https://twitter.com/BringerOfRot/status/1237018352360579072

https://twitter.com/epsalon/status/1237833281631993856 YOU KNOW GODDAMNED WELL WHAT THEY MEANT

Vancouver Rape Relief https://twitter.com/piscesgurl69/status/1236884846858752000

> Intelligence is competence at winning games and leftism-as-intelligence is a set of strategies for winning games where the victory condition is majority consensus
https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1064256082506203137

> It's like a newborn duck with wheels
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ffprqc/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_09_2020/fk83n3k/

it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, &c.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.

https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1239013977146953728

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/201611/boys-dressed-girls-who-became-serial-killers

https://medium.com/@catamphetamine/how-github-blocked-me-and-all-my-libraries-c32c61f061d3

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/fk5nxt/pregnant_people/fkqzthd/

church-state https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1212034852041699331

kind of obsessive https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/03/fight-to-make-crosswords-more-inclusive/608212/
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/01/nyt-crossword-puzzle-ethnic-slur.html

mourning MichFest: https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/fkeqy6/question_for_gender_critical_people_and_why_not/fkto0xl/

find a cite for FtM heart-attack risk

Kathleen Stock https://quillette.com/2019/04/11/ignoring-differences-between-men-and-women-is-the-wrong-way-to-address-gender-dysphoria/

the real strength of "be charitable to those you disagree with" is that it forces you to clarify your ideas in order to defend against every possible absurd misinterpretation

I think my feelings for Jessica represent an interesting interaction of the conflict between sex and "gender": my high regard for her is happening because she passes so well that my brain is tagging her as a woman (and women who understand LessWrong stuff to that level are sacred and precious), but I don't feel creepy about so openly expressing it to her or others, because I'm less afraid of hurting her, because I expect that whatever anti-rape adaptation brainware women have (that result in strange males being labeled "creepy" threats) she ... probably just doesn't have it


"Winning" arguments is uninteresting, _especially_ arguments about definitions. Everyone knows that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. What _matters_ is learning about reality, and finding concepts and representations that make reality _less_ confusing rather than _more_ confusing. If, after thousands of words of argument, someone _still_ thinks a concept that I find useful should not be used because I can't provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases and "gotcha"s—or because [it hurts someone's feelings](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)—then I guess my response is to shrug and say, "Okay, whatever, I'll continue modeling reality using my concepts, and I wish you good luck trying to do the same with yours."

[TODO: transition sentence about how the map is part of the territory]

"from the merely naive to the dense to the outright vapid" insults violate a symmetry constraint

non-rape gratitude https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1243595042557587456

----

Everyone wants to think they're an agent that's made an informed choice. And when the one comes to them and points out that they're the victim of a hostile memetic environment that's been conceptually gerrymandered to game them into making CRAZY choices for someone else's benefit, they take it personally. I certainly take it personally, and I want to learn how to stop.

From the inside, you have free choice in the sense that you don't know what you're going to do until you've finished computing it. From the outside, you're a system that can be gamed.

You're always going to be dominated by _someone's_ memeplex. The question is, if you knew more and thought faster, which parts of your current ideology would extrapolated-you construe as parasites, and which as symbiotes? You should, of course, be very suspicious of anyone who thinks they already know the answer. But perhaps it should not be seen as such a incursion to suggest that the answer may surprise you!

----

(Note the clarifying edit Alexander added at the bottom of the post, albeit only after I [threatened to escalate the civil war in our robot cult and spent Christmas Day yelling at him about it](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7). I'm not proud of my social behavior here, but when everyone you used to trust is seemingly insistent on selectively playing dumb about their own philosophy of language in a way that's optimized to trick you into cutting your dick off (independently of the empirical facts that determine whether cutting your dick off is a good idea), you tend to get desperate.)

----

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/fmg5eps/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16488877
> independent of the masculinizing effects of gonadal secretions, XY and XX brain cells have different patterns of gene expression that influence their differentiation and function

Don't speak truth to power. Speak truth against your incentive gradient. I mean, _try_ to do that. You can't _literally_ do that, because you're _always_ following your incentive gradient, by definition. Speak truth against your _current model_ of your incentive gradient.

----

Theorem: when you strike at a king, you must kill him. (Credit assignment: Ralph Waldo Emerson.)

My restatement (yours may be different, but still): when you strike at the God-Empress—well, striking at the God-Empress wouldn't work. But when you strike at one of the God-Empress's minions, you have to either kill him or provide sufficiently strong evidence that you could kill him if you wanted.

give sex denialists an inch, and they'll redefine the inch to be a mile

"I had never settled on a form": https://i.redd.it/ygbkj3ock6x31.jpg General factor of ETLE?

https://dsh.fyi/posts/2020-04-14-im-trans-call-me-daisy/

"gender modality" https://www.florenceashley.com/academic-publications.html

I'm not usually—at least, not always—so much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles

https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2019/12/are-cows-adult-bovine-females.html
https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2020/01/gendered-animal-names-a-postscript.html

marketing opportunity: https://www.peaktrans.org/contact/

https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094634/http://mariacatt.com/2016/03/31/the-adult-baby-story/

> If you want to change a culture, think in terms of the evolutionary aspects of it. You might be able to do it by just shaking things up and letting it slide into a new equilibrium, but this only works if there's an equilibrium where you want to be. Fighting the adaptation pressure is a losing game. —https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2020-02-28-06:33.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/g4mse5/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_20_2020/fo0oug1/
> a higher proportion of millionaires (5%) than women (4.9%). In addition, the proportion who want to have more than 4 children in the end (13.5%) is greater than the proportion who currently have more than 0 (13.3%)

----

https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10158118341274598?comment_id=10158118460954598&reply_comment_id=10158118537469598
> it's not terribly surprising if many autistic people are like "please just stop with the gender stuff", in which case it seems insensitive to talk about the "autistic women" category when i don't mean exactly that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/g53fgy/qt_which_pronouns_should_be_respected/fo6yk5i/
> It's possible that I would grow acclimated to this usage of singular "they" after sufficient exposure, but there are other reasons that I try to minimize my social interactions with people who use singular "they"--basically the same reasons that I try to minimize my social interactions with hardline cultural conservatives and evangelical Christians. We fundamentally disagree about some very basic principles, which means that every interaction is an exercise in biting my tongue.

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/04/25/no-more-lies-dissenting-from-gender-ideology-and-the-trans-phenomenon/
> by making non-procreative sex the new norm for everyone, a norm achieved primarily by chemical interference with female bodily functions, we ceased to be men and women and became merely heterosexuals and homosexuals. It was no very large step from there to seeing our dimorphic nature, our sexual complementarity, as lacking any real significance next to the pursuit of sexual pleasure and emotional thrills.

Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, pitied the in-betweeners

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/T8eKL6xdfL4yA2kvg/genetic-enhancement-as-a-cause-area

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/gc6iye/im_a_lesbian_and_a_leftist_but_mtf_trans_lesbians/

https://newthoughtcrime.com/

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/fp37ft6/

https://web.archive.org/web/20180418215634/https://www.pride.com/viral/2018/4/17/internet-head-over-heels-adorable-openly-gay-3-year-old

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/attorneys-for-connecticut-high-school-runners-ask-judge-to-recuse-after-he-forbids-them-from-describing-trans-athletes-as-male/

Muscle strength, size and composition following 12 months of gender-affirming treatment in transgender individuals: retained advantage for the transwomen


> And then bam, [author of https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/60gvph/culture_war_roundup_for_week_of_march_20_2017/df7el54/] show up a few months later as a trans girl.

He didn't actually transition.

https://americanmind.org/essays/children-and-transgenderism/

https://quillette.com/2019/09/24/no-one-is-born-in-the-wrong-body/
> For instance, up until age 7, many children often believe that if a boy puts on a dress, he _becomes_ a girl.


From "The Psychological Foundations of Culture"—
> This, of course, reflects folk biology, captured in the two dictionary definitions of innate as "present from birth" and as "intrinsic." Social constructivist arguments frequently take the form that because thus-and-such is absent at birth, or doesn't appear until after age seven, or until after puberty, it is obviously "learned" or "socially constructed." AS a result, a common, but generally irrelevant feature of "nativist" versus "environmentalist" debates is over what is "present from birth." This confuses (among other things) the question of whether something is expressed at the time of birth with whether there exists in the individual evolved devel- opmental mechanisms that may activate and organize the expression of an adaptation at some point in the life cycle. Developmental processes continue to bring additional adaptations on line (as well as remove them) at least until adulthood, and there is an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that agedriven adaptive changes in psycho- logical architecture continue throughout adulthood (see, e.g., Daly & Wilson, 1988). Thus, just as teeth and breasts are absent at birth and develop later in an individual's life history, perceptual organization, domain-specific reasoning mechanisms, the language acquisition device, motivational organization, and many other intricate psychological adaptations mature and are elaborated in age-specific fashions that are not simply the product of the accumulation of "experience." Consequently, psychological adaptations may be developmentally timed to appear, disappear, or change operation to mesh with the changing demands of different age-specific tasks, such as parenting, emotional decoding of the mother's voice, language acquisition, species-appropriate song learning, and so on (Daly & Wilson, 1988; Fernald, this volume; Marler, 199 1; Newport, 1990).
> For any particular gender difference, many psy- chologists are interested in whether it was caused (1) by sexually monomorphic psy- chologies encountering differential treatment by the social world, or (2) by sexually differentiated developmental mechanisms encountering treatment from the social world, whether that treatment was uniform or differential. As interesting as this ques- tion may be, however, the fact that an expressed gender difference may first appear after birth, or even late in life, is evidence neither for nor against either of these views.

Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind


> Do you consent to peristalsis or apoptosis or the Krebs cycle?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/glg1o7/qt_blind_spots_and_hypocrisy_in_gc_ideology/fqz1om6/


https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/roth-castes-chimps-and-rangordnung/
> The losers in this struggle may keep their actual gonads, but they lose their repeaters, i.e., the institutions which install values and beliefs in the young.

religion security hole  https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/two-kinds-of-repeaters/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-penn-law-professor-wants-to-make-america-white-again

https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/gmpzr4/gc_what_part_of_being_trans_do_you_consider_it/fr6ejj0/

https://tracieokeefe.com/autogynephilia-and-autoandrophilia-in-non-sex-and-gender-dysphoric-persons/

> There was ONE space that was ours and that was a safe space
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/gkcmhj/peak_trans_xi_tell_your_story_here/frb8smz/

"The value in framing is thought to account for the majority of defensive value behind the plate." (i.e., decieving the umpire)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/catcher-is-baseballs-most-endangered-position/
https://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/4/5/389840/framing-the-debate
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/catcher-is-baseballs-most-endangered-position/

bioleninism stack
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/glv7wt/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_18_2020/frknefk/

https://medium.com/@ebolo/heres-why-the-black-white-iq-gap-is-almost-certainly-genetic-fb8cdf032655

Razib on race—
"What do you call a black doctor?" https://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001391.html
"Individual impact of affirmative action" https://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000724.html

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-coopers-park-20200526-m4yhi6vkcfea3kxk3ntjc736s4-story.html
https://www.facebook.com/671885228/posts/10158742137255229/

https://web.archive.org/web/20200527112443/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/us/coronavirus-testing-seattle-bill-gates.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/e85hvr/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_december_09/famxd26/?context=3

complicity: https://chainsawsuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/20141015-theperfectcrime.png

https://openpsychometrics.org/_rawdata/

http://www.cbc-network.org/2020/04/lets-talk-about-lupron/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-nhs-has-quietly-changed-its-trans-guidance-to-reflect-reality

https://heterodoxacademy.org/seizing-means-knowledge-production/

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/04/19/understanding-the-academic-achievement-gaps/

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/after-months-of-pleading-for-coronavirus-social-distancing-health-officials-supportive-of-protests-black-lives-matter-calls-them-too-dangerous/

one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, \"My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!\" And they're like, \"Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!\" And I'm like, \"Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. 

> Impressive that left and right have executed their second swap of positions on the pandemic.
https://twitter.com/SilDogood/status/1268233007737036800

https://mustreadalaska.com/fairbanks-espresso-doubles-down-calls-its-pro-trump-customers-fascists-nazis/?fbclid=IwAR15fblt79rVCdEB-j1MlYtPk7NhascdCQ8TWwsp8zji5C-OiAvVIaT411E

https://thevelvetchronicle.com/anonymous-letter-from-a-terrified-lesbian-thoughtcrime/
https://thevelvetchronicle.com/why-is-nobody-talking-about-cognitive-brain-development-in-the-rush-to-transition-kids/

"Defund the police" follows the logic of "give less money to orgs that do bad things", but they wouldn't say "Defund CPS"
https://twitter.com/CharlesFLehman/status/1269964759606210560

https://www.quantamagazine.org/males-are-the-taller-sex-estrogen-not-fights-for-mates-may-be-why-20200608/

"Black" but "white": https://twitter.com/jessesingal/status/1272984924686110720

https://medium.com/@kittyit/on-hurting-trans-women-a4a0ef1ef8d4
https://medium.com/@kittyit/re-twitter-terms-of-service-c681356d0809

https://twitter.com/sgrif/status/1273090735122927616

https://medium.com/@dave_45588/response-to-andrew-carter-re-j-k-rowling-pt-2-556d9b9113b1

23 June 2020: people are STILL citing "Categories Were Made", TWICE when people on the subreddit asked "What is Slate Star Codex"?
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvqv9av/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hef5es/hi_what_was_slate_star_codex/fvr47v1/
> But the blog wasn't always on that 'side', either. Scott wrote one of the best analyses/defenses of trans identity and nonbiological definition of gender that I've ever read, and which ultimately convinced me.
Yet again someone citing "Categories Were Made" as influential: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/he96rm/star_slate_codex_deleted_because_of_nyt_article/fvr7h7w/

people are STILL citing this shit! (14 Nov): https://twitter.com/Baltimoron87/status/1327730282703835137

Even the enemies respect that post!
https://twitter.com/KirinDave/status/1275647936194654208

And using it for defense.

Two mentions in https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhy2yc/what_would_you_put_in_the_essential_ssc_collection/

Another "Made for Man" cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwwxycr/

More damage control: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hpohy5/what_are_some_of_scotts_posts_that_challenge_the/fxsu8p0/
(Comment was deleted. Was I over the line in commenting at all, or just because of the "transparently political reasons" side-swipe? The fact that it got ~18 points suggests the readership was OK with it, even if the moderators weren't)

People are still citing it! https://twitter.com/churrundo/status/1283578666425806851

Another new cite: https://twitter.com/FollowSamir/status/1289168867831373825

Another new cite: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning/

Another new cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kdxbyd/this_blog_is_incredible/gg04f8c/ "My personal favorites among these are [ ], [... Not Man for the Categories], 10, and 2 in that order."

Another new cite: https://twitter.com/rbaron321/status/1361841879445364739

31 December
"SSC also helped me understand trans issues" https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kng0q4/mixed_feelings_on_scott_alexander/

darwin2500 "Women's leagues are for women, trans women are women. That's all the justification needed" https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hym5xb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_27_2020/fzvfres/

another "Categories Were Made" cite, just as an example post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/survey_on_moving_ssc_to_substack/fzwkfqk/

"Sex Does Not Mean Gender. Equating Them Erases Trans Lives." https://archive.is/Mmlmi

smart-fascist on trans programmers: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwf86ju/

white people were violent back then: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hhtwxi/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_29_2020/fwfyif9/

https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-activists-a-story-in-screenshots-78e01dca68d

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/fashion/where-have-all-the-tomboys-gone.html

Smart people are sex erasure rather than sex denial, but erasure is a lot like denial when the phenomenon is decision-relevant ("we don't have a gender gap, just an assigned sex at birth gap"). (Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism)

-----

Drafted this for Duncan's wall, but I have serious writing to do; it's not worth my time to get into—

I think I would be a LOT more likely to transition in a world where trans-people-as-a-collective-interest-group weren't such totalitarians hell-bent on Orwellian mind control. (In our world, I ended up quitting HRT after five months, and I never expected to stay on it indefinitely: http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/ )

Humans can't literally change sex given current technology (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)! You can't control how people perceive you! If wanting to be able to reason about the predictively-useful natural category of biological sex using simple language (http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) constitutes a lack of "basic fucking respect", well, gee, I guess I don't respect you, you Stalinist motherfuckers!

(I think that slips under Duncan's rule of "no attacks directly at specific people", because "you Stalinist motherfuckers" isn't specific.)

The one time I posted in /r/GenderCritical, I got a reply that said, "You are a predator." That was pretty hurtful and unjustified—I spent a lot of Christmas Day 2016 crying as a result. But ... that's obviously MY problem. I chose to post something in someone else's community, and my feelings were hurt by the reply. That's not warrant to destroy someone else's community! (Yes, I understand that Reddit is a private company and the 1st Amendment doesn't apply, but Reddit still has a lot of quasi-monopoly power due to network effects, and that power has consequences.)

----

https://medium.com/@mary.leng/harry-potter-and-the-reverse-voltaire-4c7f3a07241

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rolltodisbelieve/2020/07/07/j-k-rowling-and-the-measuring-of-a-woman/
> I've noticed that authoritarian people love to define manhood and womanhood: to lay down the law about who qualifies for each particular label.

https://www.outfrontmagazine.com/trending/facial-recognition-bias/
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/7/21128236/gender-app-giggle-women-ai-screen-trans-social
> A new, female-only social media platform—Giggle—is being marketed as a safe space for women. The app uses a 3D scan of the users' faces in order to verify them as females. But there’s one problem: it doesn't work if you’re trans.
> That’s problematic on a number of fronts, not least of which is that bone structure is clearly a poor indicator of gender identity.

"The facts that need to be explained" http://archive.is/rjs7R

https://www.facebook.com/aboyd.boyd/posts/4167291901694


https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/hq9emh/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_the_week_of/fy6ymq1/
> For many black people in particular, white societies are suffocating with their demands of restraint and industriousness; much like the worst stereotypes of Asian societies are suffocating from White point of view. Remember that article Scott reposted, on a Chinese school where children are forced to follow extremely precise and meaningless instructions for hours on end, suppressing their every impulse? That's how the world looks when you have poor impulse control.

https://saidit.net/s/thisneverhappens/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/sex-gender-and-gender-identity-a-reevaluation-of-the-evidence/76A3DC54F3BD91E8D631B93397698B1A

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/freedom-to-think-the-need-for-thorough-assessment-and-treatment-of-gender-dysphoric-children/F4B7F5CAFC0D0BE9FF3C7886BA6E904B/share/800abbaff82cc6eaa399c52d957a565b6978d459

https://periodaisle.com/blogs/all/6-transgender-women-talk-menstruation

https://arcdigital.media/cancel-clusters-77fada5d7a8a

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/amp/Lecturer-sacked-praising-Jewish-scientists-German-engineers-slams-woke-brigade.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/parenting/non-binary-children-support.html

https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/07/14/1919091117

> the fact is there is no single word that accurately captures every shade of meaning
https://sigmaleph.dreamwidth.org/54093.html

thispersondoesnotexist.com should offer age/race/sex radio buttons rather than just "Another"
but I guess if the model was just trained on a bunch of unlabeled face photos, it's not going to be obvious what to change to generate "only females"
the model must have learned the features somehow in order to produce such realistic results

https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1165832120784146432
the sad, continuous pain of seeing both sides, yet being on this one

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/i2r8qo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_august_03_2020/g0tp7wq/
> As an aside, sometimes it's great if English isn't your first language, because then, all of this stuff immediately stands out. [...] In Dutch, there is no word for 'gender' as opposed to 'sex'. [...] The local woke then imported the term from English along with the concept. So now, when e.g. the [...] city council of Amsterdam puts out press releases, the English word "gender" stands out like a sore thumb from the otherwise Dutch sentences and it's completely obvious to everyone what's going on.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071013171416/http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/06/11/the-stamp-collecting-device/

Um, given our shared cultural context, I feel compelled to mention that I see myself as mostly making empirical and logical claims rather than being intrinsically value-unaligned? Such that, if you have specific counterarguments against my crusade (especially ones I'm not likely to have considered before), I'd be very grateful to hear them!

(Because if the counterarguments are good, then I'm wrong and I should stop. Obviously.)

And, like, the pure philosophy of language part in particular looks REALLY solid (and note that Jessica Taylor, who helped me with the math, agrees), even if empirical disagreements affect exactly how the philosophy applies to complex contemporary social issues—love to know what you think in the comments: 


But I guess you probably don't trust my rationality that much? Like, I expect us to agree that if you're not a topic-specialist, you're not likely to say things that I haven't heard before, whereas I am likely to say things you haven't heard before (even if you've read my blog, there's more I haven't written up yet)—but that's just a matter of me sinking compute into the particular topic; if I'm opposing a consensus that you trust, you might be confident that I'm in the wrong, even if it's not worth your time to pin down exactly why.

Sorry if that observation was boring.

https://uncommongroundmedia.com/deconstructing-the-good-transwomen/

NYT—"Who Should Compete in Women's Sports? There Are 'Two Almost Irreconcilable Positions'": https://archive.is/Ckygw

https://saidit.net/s/GenderCritical/comments/677z/the_clothesstealing_lesbianobsessed_agp/

https://www.jbhe.com/features/49_college_admissions-test.html

Andrew Sullivan profile https://archive.is/qviCi

"Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71467-z 

I want to be careful not to fall into the trap of being a generic social conservative. My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; 

Doctoral thesis on TG/TF fantasy!
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4codai/
https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/065cf404-3114-4a42-a433-558eec179159/1/richard%20pilbeam%20thesis.pdf

https://reclaimthenet.org/threats-of-violence-censorship-for-womens-rights-groups/
https://archive.vn/hQFh1

pee fantasy: https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/09/swap-clinic-favorite-thing.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/f0dfmt/has_anyone_ever_wrestled_with_guys_and_be/

> Make a mistake, suffer a disaster, learn a lesson. Make two mistakes, suffer a disaster, learn half a lesson.
https://twitter.com/spaceandgames/status/210229439395659776

Oftentimes you genuinely happen to run out of time for a particular conversation, and that's fine: if your stopping algorithm is based on how busy you are that day and the expected information value of the remaining conversation, then we should expect to get accurate shared maps _eventually_, even if some topics get "unlucky" that you were busy that day. If your stopping algorithm is based on political convenience (you leave the conversation _because_ the other party made a good point that you're not allowed to admit in Berkeley), then we _don't_ converge to accurate shared maps!

https://www.fastcompany.com/90455454/im-a-trans-woman-google-photos-doesnt-know-how-to-categorize-me

more Reiner:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421517/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421518/ "Genetic males with maletypical prenatal androgen effects should be reared male."

Tail said only a third of the variance in personality self-report is real; I asked how we know, and he says you can do math on multiple informants—
https://replicationindex.com/2019/07/21/hidden-invalidity-of-personality-measures/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227671578_What_multi-method_data_tell_us_about_construct_validity
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00282.x

https://psyarxiv.com/f2wkt/

https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/09/30/on-proposed-environmental-causes-of-the-american-black-white-iq-gap/

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/09/22/men-of-character-on-the-rise-cold-numbers-fading/

https://gript.ie/female-guards-raped-in-prison-by-trans-inmates-says-former-minister/

https://uncommongroundmedia.com/the-four-horsemen-of-the-gender-critical-apocalypse/

https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/7333.html "Markets launder history"—the analogy to trans history-rewriting makes me way more sympathetic to leftists

https://carcinisation.com/2020/07/04/the-ongoing-accomplishment-of-the-big-five/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13178-020-00502-5
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13178-020-00489-z

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/j165sq/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_28/g7iydmv/
> But your family, clan, kin are naturally biased in your favor by simple oxytocin-driven mechanics of attachment, and family provides you with more support as it grows; and men have been helplessly biased in favor of their women since time immemorial (but you can think no farther than Esther). Your "identity", on the other hand, owes you nothing: instead, you owe everything to it, as it is in the power of your identity's political representatives to paint you a champion or a traitor, and you become more replaceable the bigger your alliance grows. It is a much less robust, much more adversarial and suspicious and cold, much less humane way to run a society

https://transfemscience.org/articles/

https://defmacro.substack.com/p/against-xkcd-1357
https://defmacro.substack.com/p/from-corporate-politics-there-is
https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2020/10/06/review-of-rod-drehers-live-not-by-lies/
https://bonald.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/die-hard-a-model-of-the-enemys-motivation/

robot cult influence:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2corc0/just_in_case_hes_a_reddit_troll/ (compare https://www.lesswrong.com/users/grendelkhan)
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/16457 (compare https://www.lesswrong.com/users/wizzwizz4)

https://www.ginamaya.co.uk/transgender-life/on-adopting-a-more-gender-critical-transgender-activism.html

https://reason.com/2020/10/09/coupled-barred-from-fostering-their-1-year-old-great-granddaughter-because-of-their-opposition-to-homosexuality-and-gender-transitioning/

egregore capture
https://twitter.com/ElaineAtwell/status/1314261010547695620

https://blog.jim.com/war/the-way-through-to-the-other-side-of-the-left-singularity/
> Every tenured academic everywhere in the world abruptly changes position overnight when the wind from Harvard and Yale changes.

https://male-to-female.org/en/philosophy

https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/duty-to-disclose-adverse-legal-authority

https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/jeky8e/voxs_kelsey_piper_on_being_called_a_tradwife_i/g9hoi6p/
> Leftists don't need a Quiverfull movement, because we can count on each of our Vile Offspring to seduce and ruin at least four Quiverfull kids each.
[the brood-parasite strategy made explicit!]

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/09/write-to-say-stuff-worth-knowing.html
> If you can then get other influential writers in overlapping topic areas to read and be persuaded by your argument, you might contribute to a larger process whereby we all learn faster by usefully dividing up the task of learning about everything.

Motta-Mena and Puts has the awesome probability-of-gynephilia-by-intersex-condition graph, "Endocrinology of human female sexuality, mating, and reproductive behavior"

listen later: https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/15/whats-the-matter-with-liberalism-talking-with-alex-kaschuta/

"still having Donna's brain"
http://theinsomniactg.blogspot.com/2020/10/not-body-id-have-chosen.html

https://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/talia-mae-bettcher-professor-and-chair

https://www.fast.ai/2020/10/28/code-of-conduct/

"World Rugby Bars Transgender Women, Baffling Players" https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/sports/olympics/world-rugby-transgender-women.html

kayfabe: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783

https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/

Idaho plantiff: https://uploads.ovarit.com/91cd2b5b-f8e9-52b0-86e4-b1b5104e5350.jpg

https://www.christianpost.com/news/gofundme-removes-puberty-is-not-a-medical-condition-billboard.html

https://quillette.com/2020/10/31/i-signed-up-to-study-sexual-health-what-i-got-was-gender-ideology-fetishism-and-porn/

https://www.ladyscience.com/essays/the-dangers-of-categorizing-trans-desire

> Importantly, the team cannot know the individual's gender identity, but rather only biological sex (which like gender doesn't always exist on a binary). In other words, they can't say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman.
https://archive.is/ocQWg

thread on the clothing-swap problem
https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1323837794259619842
including a DM about AGP: https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1324016024019062790

https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/11/swap-clinic-pay-piper.html

help me understand: https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/jnxgm3/genuinely_please_help_me_understand/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/reader-center/nonbinary-teens-reporting.html

"Voter Fraud a Myth? That's Not What New York Investigators Found": https://archive.is/biahk

https://quillette.com/2020/11/07/gender-activists-are-trying-to-cancel-my-book-why-is-silicon-valley-helping-them/

> social upheaval means it's time to go all in on crypto, precious metals
https://twitter.com/HiFromMichaelV/status/1324693317188308993

"The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Probabilistic Inference: Evidence from the Domain of Color"—study, summarize, and apply this to gender!!!
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0158725

citation engine https://scite.ai/

https://herandrews.com/2015/03/01/women-against-suffrage/

https://www.christianpost.com/news/ministry-sue-bank-over-dropping-account-due-to-reparative-therapy.html
https://unherd.com/2020/10/how-corporations-can-delete-your-existence/

I'm currently planning on donating $500 to Kelly Loeffler
[...]
So, I agree that Orange Man Bad. But, Orange Man Gone! (Okay, there are some lawsuits to wrap up, but I don't think anyone expects those to go anywhere.)

https://www.out.com/news/2020/11/11/norway-has-made-biphobic-transphobic-speech-illegal

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jdvqk5/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_19/g9jw30k/?context=3
> This is because once they hit puberty, no one wants young men around unless they're recruiting for a terrorist cell. [...] Whereas literally everyone wants young women. They come off as determined to be fuckups because they're being actively courted/recruited. Boys are left to fuck up their own lives.

A vote for Kelly Loeffler is a vote for gridlock! A vote for gridlock is a vote to hit the brakes on our ongoing cultural revolution! A vote to hit the brakes is vengeance for Steve Hsu! A civilization that can't avenge Steve Hsu is DEAD (sooner or later and probably sooner) 2/2

> Somebody can be born with a wiener, but not be a boy. Somebody else can be a boy, but not have a wiener.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-do-boys-have-wieners/

Is the Culture War lost? https://letter.wiki/conversation/930

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/ray-blanchard-transgender-orthodoxy/

> we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/170990-suppose-one-reads-a-story-of-filthy-atrocities-in-the


If you demand that people change how they think and talk about the world specifically in order to prove they're on your side (rather than because you have evidence and arguments explaining why your model is more accurate in the relevant domain), then people who care about thinking clearly will may reluctantly conclude they're not, in fact, on your side?

Note, this is compatible with trans rights insofar as "more accurate in the relevant domain" can include grouping transsexuals with their social gender rather than their developmental sex, because it's possible for social transition to actually succeed on the merits of actually passing (or getting "close enough"), rather than acquiecing to demands. (Isn't that the goal? To successfully transition, and organically be perceived as your target sex?)

If someone looks like a man, and sounds like a man, and I can model him as a man in the range of circumstances I interact with him without making any grievous prediction errors, then I call him a man even if he's technically a female on testosterone—not as a favor, but because it genuinely seems like the best word to describe what I'm seeing. Futhermore, if I don't perceive someone as a man, but everyone else does (or speaks as if they do), I'll usually go along with the majority's language usage for game-theoretic reasons (explanation: http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/). But if he further demands that I'm not even allowed to use the phrase "female on testosterone" to describe what I think is going on in this situation, then we have a problem.

Trump—
> devastating in their percentage and power of destruction

Like I said, it would seem the disagreement centers around how robust the trait-clusters are, and how useful it is to be able to use simple language to talk about the overwhelming-majority case, and I'm wary of these standards being selectively varied for political reasons that, however well-intentioned, actually in-practice interfere with our collective ability to make sense of the world.

When I say "selectively varied", I mean that the same standards aren't being applied evenhandedly to different topic-areas. For example, when talking about the anatomy of the hands, you might end up offhandedly saying something like, "Humans have ten fingers." I think it's good for people to be able to say "Humans have ten fingers" in most contexts without it being construed as a denial of the facts that polydactyly exists and that some people lose fingers in accidents. (It's true that polydactyly exists! And it's true that some people lose fingers in accidents! I enthusiastically affirm both of those facts! But I think it's also true that ... you know what I meant.)

This is also my rationale for wanting "Men are the ones with penises" to be considered "true" in most contexts. The claim isn't that trans men don't exist; the claim is that adult human males are the prototypical thing that trans men are imitating (to the limits of available technology), such that it's useful for many unmarked usages of "man"/"men" to be understood to refer to the prototype unless there's some contextual reason to think otherwise.

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/11/18/uc-berkeley-strips-the-names-of-professors-with-racist-views-off-3-buildings

(I remember Logan Brienne recommended Will Powers on Facebook)
https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/
https://archive.is/DnxUM
He thinks AGP is erotic-only, but gender euphoria is OK

Funny exchange— https://twitter.com/The_WGD/status/1329872398087303173
> You're slipping into the Sailer zone, and while he's not exactly canceled...it's your risk to take, but if you drift slowly enough, you won't notice when you're past the line.
> What's the worst thing that Sailer has ever said?
> we don't know because he said it on his alt

Pay gap among Uber drivers: https://nber.org/papers/w26380

Millenials are children: https://archive.fo/KOHS3

I should read the new Julia Serano paper. Serano, J. (2020). Autogynephilia: A scientific review, feminist analysis, and alternative ‘embodiment fantasies’ model. The Sociological Review, 68(4), 763–778. (Note on skimming: it's actually significantly less mendacious than her previous work!)

The map is not the territory. For an ideal observer passively viewing the world from behind a Cartesian veil, the map reflects the territory, and never the other way around: beliefs and reality interact in only one direction. Unfortunately, human social life is a little more complicated than this: when our beliefs about the world affect the reality of what people do, then we can have self-fulfilling prophecies: the territory bulldozed to fit the map. But self-fulfilling prophecies are still only a second-order effect: reality affects your thoughts directly (via sensory perception), whereas your thoughts only affect reality insofar as someone cares what you think.

https://www.transgendertrend.com/trans-kids-reject-family-not-other-way-around/

https://rewirenewsgroup.com/article/2020/11/23/is-there-a-terf-at-your-thanksgiving-gathering/

https://medium.com/@Chican3ry/female-embodiment-fantasies-1e4bab7dc3f0

https://nypost.com/2020/11/24/florida-woman-charged-in-machete-attack-wanted-to-be-with-mans-wife/

https://www.cato.org/blog/history-crowdfunding-wake-violence

Julia Serano: "Women who have struggled against patriarchal ideals of what makes a 'real' woman think nothing of turning around and using the world 'real' against trans women." The problem with the patriarchal ideals was not the word 'real'!

https://world.wng.org/content/washington_erasing_parents_from_the_equation

"Trans women dropkicked & beat a racist throwing slurs at them. The judge said he deserved it." https://archive.is/MWyIB

https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/
https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/guardian-staff-trans-rights-letter

"Transgender Population Size in the United States: a Meta-Regression of Population-Based Probability Samples" https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303578a

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7

This is actually good storytelling: https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/11/magic-friend-zone-curse.html

> Lesbian culture required the taboo to exist, and since it no longer does as religious objections faded, gay and bisexual women overwhelmingly meet and socialize in normal female company like straight women do. 
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jzbis2/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_23/gdtfzuz/

https://eev.ee/blog/2020/06/11/rowling-is-dangerously-wrong/
https://medium.com/@notCursedE/7-things-trans-people-never-actually-said-1ab5e5ce11da

https://twitter.com/jesstheunstill/status/1334942407897587712
> This was impressive! I was just in an Software Engineering boot camp at a tech company, and it was lead by two women of color, and the attendees were appx 10 women, 4 men, one non-binary person, and at least half were not white.

https://theprovince.com/news/national/hunter-trans-jailbird-accused-of-sexually-assaulting-female-con/wcm/83654fa7-ef24-475a-a725-c56420a15e46

The tragedy: we do want to help women and minorities, but not the ideological victimhood-identity mind-virus. But if the mind-virus captures all the smart women and minorities at our universities (which women and minorities feel even more pressure to go to than I did!—part of what made my autodidacticism feasible was my white male privilege, that autodidact male geniuses are more believable)

recommended on /r/TheMotte about gestures https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/364

article about the Timnit Gebru paper: https://archive.is/6TX2Y

"Smith College alumni demand 'further training' for white staffer who decried anti-white work environment": https://archive.vn/wzlZD

----

> Do you agree with [people only act confused about biological sex when men wanted something]
> Do you think that, if you look at the history of biological sex problematization/denialism (in academia, social media, etc), there's more influence from DMAB people than DFAB people?

To your first question: the Tweet says "only reason", which is usually false. (Nodes in a Bayesian network can have multiple parents!) If we amend to "a significant reason, plausibly the most significant reason", then yes, in the following sense.

In the possible world where the parameters of male sexual psychology are such that autogynephilia doesn't exist "but everything else is the same", then I don't think you get the kind and scope of trans-activism movement that Saotome-Westlake's and Adams-Miller's writing is a reaction to. In this world, you still get Judith Butler (AFAB, Gender Trouble published 1990) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (AFAB, Sexing the Body published 2000), but I think you don't get pronoun stickers at conferences in 2018 and you don't get a "three-year-old Merlin Blume is a girl now; she verbally confirmed it!" social-reality enforcement campaign in 2020.

To your second question, it might actually depend on how you operationalize "influence"! Notably, the campaign to trans Merlin (whose parents met on lesswrong.com) is being run predominantly by AFAB people; they're just combatants in the service of an ideology that I don't think would have been so memetically fit if it weren't such a convenient accommodation for AGP. (At least, that's my theory under the doctrine of "algorithmic intent"; the people involved don't think of themselves as combatants in the service of anything.)

----

Two years ago, you wrote: "I wonder how would the rationalist movement (I meant the LessWrong cluster of folks) approach AGP if they could have a completely fresh start? Could there be a way to use the correlation between being intelligent/quantitative and being AGP to break the irrationalist trans ideology?"

Well, I tried. I failed. I'm all out of cards. I blogged; I argued, many times, with everyone who would listen, including local celebrities (Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander). I still have a lot more writing to do for my own scholarly ambitions, but political/education efforts on my native subculture in particular are almost certainly saturated: if we were going to start a Zeitgeist change here, it would have already happened by now.

There hasn't been no effect (people are aware of the typology as a hypothesis, with much thanks to Tailcalled and Ozy's Intellectual Turing Test), but I can't point to anyone doing anything meaningfully differently re impacts on women, our ability to think about sex.

I'm still pretty horrified that the sticking point in discussions seems to have been not the AGP etiology itself (which is what I was focusing on in 2016/2017), but the category-boundaries-are-arbitrary "insight." So it's not just that we failed to break the irrationalist trans ideology: we actually invented something arguably worse! (Ordinary trans activists at least try to make (confused) truth claims; we invented a fully general counteragument against truth claims that's all the more dangerous thanks to the virtue of a very narrow kind of technical correctness.)

-----

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking

https://www.wired.com/story/science-journals-are-purging-racist-sexist-work-finally/
https://archive.is/beD9M

https://4w.pub/my-whole-conversation-with-kaitlyn-tiffany-for-the-atlantic/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/reddit-ovarit-the-donald/617320/
https://archive.is/lqKUe

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/keira-bell-s-victory-is-an-important-one-for-trans-teenagers

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9041725/Mum-called-trans-woman-Twitter-CLEARED-wrongdoing.html

"Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
"How does hormone transition in transgender women"
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/02/28/bjsports-2020-103106

https://impossiblehq.com/well-see/

https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2020/06/black-lives-matter.html

https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/

social pressure on judges
https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-thorny-problem-of-inconstant-judges.html

"The part is subordinate to the whole: female outliers"
https://archive.is/UKNjx

https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-teaching/

"Failed Assignments — Rethinking Sex Designations on Birth Certificates" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2025974

you think you're pumping against the incentive gradient, but actually you're just facing a weird dark-matter incentive landscape
https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154648983465199

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/61-the-nomos-of-the-earth
> The past can inspire us; it can teach us; but it can never be our destination.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/22/the-gender-heretics-are-finally-winning-the-terf-wars/

https://thoughtsofstone.com/the-day-the-logic-died/

http://bostonreview.net/race-philosophy-religion-gender-sexuality/robin-dembroff-dee-payton-why-we-shouldnt-compare

https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/khaseo/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_the_week_of/gh8kd5q/
> Give a bunch of men the option to couch their fetish in the trappings of womanhood and they will do so with gusto, and bully their way to the top. Then give women the choice between siding with the men and winning constantly, or side against the men and become a pariah, and the outcome is inevitable.

https://medium.com/@Siltha1.0/caroline-criado-perez-is-a-terf-35c489e59ad9

https://twitter.com/av_rose_ev/status/1340393165090516992
> Years 3-5 of transition for trans women is recognizing how much of your relationship to your community is contingent upon you performing reproductive labor for your friends because it's the only way they continue to engage you as a woman and yes that includes cracking eggs.

"Richer color vocabulary is associated with better color memory but not color perception" (h/t Sailer https://www.unz.com/isteve/orwell-got-it-right-about-sapir-whorf/)
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31046

The "Finer-grained sterotypes" point seems to be a point in favor of "there are more than two genders", but the lack of a clear truth condition is a point against

trans outcome bibliogrpahy comment https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kq3o1s/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_04/gid9v2d/

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/

https://www.praile.net/post/kathleen-stock-obe

"Sleep Deprivation Disrupts Prepulse Inhibition and Induces Psychosis-Like Symptoms in Healthy Humans"
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/27/9134.short
"Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis With Increasing Time Awake"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6048360/

https://childrenoftransitioners.org/2021/01/24/the-abusive-autogynephile/


https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10158884242629598

> I just read an anecdote in which someone who's never had a penis claimed that "erection states intention", which I think is definitely false and also an extremely harmful thing to incorrectly believe. But I can understand why many cisgendered heterosexual woman would have such a strong impression that this is the case. 

I want to say: 'Why is the reference class here "cisgendered heterosexual women" rather than "biological females"? Cis lebians and trans men and also don't have first-person experience of erections.' ... but that's just going to get into a rabbithole of phalloplasty-penis erections count (where I haven't read the literature)

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/l4ii8x/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_25/gld6zgb/
"trickle-down narrative economics. [...] The influence of thr NYT isnt best described in absolute value of its readership, but thr social graph of how its ideas penetrate all the way to thr bottom through more complex social networks of influence"

https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/some-early-reader-nominations-for-fits/
From the comments—"when the NYTimes publishes a bunch of op-eds saying 'believe this' or 'do this' that often actually happens. [...] But when Scott Alexander makes a blog post, things don't happen."

"no matter what we called ourselves, the dynamics stayed the exact same" https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/16208/tifs-need-to-notice-how-little-tims-actually-care-about-them/93e81379-a59b-4135-a5a1-9f5227af8c31#comment-93e81379-a59b-4135-a5a1-9f5227af8c31

> if [...] I had been cis.
["if I hadn't had dysphoria" vs. "if I had been biologically female are very different counterfactuals!]
https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1356490859324170241

"Differences in cortical structure between cognitively normal East Asian and Caucasian older adults: a surface-based morphometry study"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77848-8

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-02-05/trumpite-neighbor-unity-capitol-attack

B.F. on JKR (https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3883966591638029?comment_id=3884054068295948&reply_comment_id=3884243454943676):
> I am very glad that I don't have anyone with opinions similar to hers in my immediate vicinity, because I am pretty sure that if I did, my brain would constantly be running a scared loop in any social interactions with them. [...]  I think it's important that people can write essays that are as far outside my personal Overton window as hers is outside it (because sometimes they're correct and I should update, even though I don't believe this is an instance of that)

https://www.newsweek.com/we-need-balance-when-it-comes-gender-dysphoric-kids-i-would-know-opinion-1567277

https://trickymothernature.substack.com/p/one-long-cum

"Horrified Mother Gets Front Row Seat to Sex & Gender Indoctrination Strategy Meeting"
https://archive.li/pmuhQ

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

"A Typology of Gender Detransition and Its Implications for Healthcare Providers"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2020.1869126

https://medium.com/@mariacatt42/how-to-do-your-own-differential-diagnosis-and-why-its-total-bullshit-that-you-would-have-to-461077985659

black physics grad student
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/lk8abe/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_15/go3rqcf/

(paywalled)
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/20/little-is-known-about-the-effects-of-puberty-blockers

(metered)
https://gen.medium.com/the-sports-arena-has-become-conservatives-favorite-anti-trans-battleground-8cc3adc533cf

https://wepon.tumblr.com/post/620926931352862720/my-current-top-10-favorite-posts-on-slate-star

I've frequently argued against the social practice of people being expected to declare (in their social media profile, or on badges at conferences) what third-person pronouns others should use to refer to oneself. The end goal of transitioning—one would think—is to be organically perceived as the sex other than one's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/).

What pronoun other people _naturally_ use to refer to you when they're _not_ trying to be polite, but just trying to _talk about the world they see_ in the language that comes naturally to them, is a test of whether your transition is actually _succeeding_ at the goal of changing your (perceived) sex.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article#comment-1263382
> like a screed complaining about Jewish bankers, being read by someone whose only opinion of bankers is that they provide a safe place for him to store his money

https://avoiceformen.com/featured/my-son-doesnt-want-to-be-a-man/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2695466/

https://jezebel.com/these-girls-just-wanted-to-run-the-right-wanted-a-war-1846280528

https://unspeakablelgbtq.weebly.com/the-stories

"Varied Reports of Adult Transgender Suicidality: Synthesizing and Describing the Peer-Reviewed and Gray Literature"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436370/

------

[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)

I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.

[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.

If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).

(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)

Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)

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Amy Harmon quoting Half Sigma and Jason Malloy back in the day?! Times have changed https://archive.is/6cXMD

Univariate fallacy again https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html

https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/america-has-a-boy-crisis/

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The problem isn't that I particularly care about citing some particular Canadian clinical psychologist; the problem is that I aspire to work in a paradigm that's _solely_ about minimizing the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions (even when it hurts, perhaps _especially_ when it hurts), which puts me in conflict with a culture that prioritizes other things, like "politeness" or "not triggering horrible dysphoria" or "not giving rhetorical ammunition to our hate-filled ideological enemies who want me and my friends to not-exist". Removing citations to the Canadian clinical psychologist wouldn't actually solve the real conflict.

I mean that the joint trait distribution of males-on-exogenous-estrogen-who-have-either-been-castrated-or-are-on-spironolactone is not only not the same as the joint trait distribution of untreated natal females, it's _also_ going to be a better fit to the joint trait distribution of untreated natal males along the many dimensions that aren't sufficiently affected by exogenous hormone replacement therapy, and that this is sufficiently robust that it's useful to be able to express concisely with a short phrase such as "biological sex exists", even in cases where I don't have the expertise or data to prove it, and this is important because most of life depends on tacit knowledge embedded in linguistic and cultural priors, rather than provable expertise and data.

There's this cultural pattern that only went mainstream about five years ago where smart progressive people want to apply _strict scrutiny_ to any attempt to refer to or reason about sex. The culture almost never requires you to flat-out _lie_ about anything; there's just this coordinated juggernaut of gerrymandered concepts and unparsimonious implied causal theories and isolated demands for rigor that I think are _in practice_ making everyone crazy, even if you can never catch anyone in an easily verifiable lie.

Ordinary people can _in fact_ recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy (hair covered, males clean-shaven) even though we don't have introspective access to _how_ our brains are accomplishing this high-dimensional image-classification task: <http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf>, and this is actually important for understanding what's actually going on in the heads of TERFs who cry, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that's a man! How dumb do you think we are?! Fraud!! Gaslighting!!1!"

If the normative high-status response in your culture is to say, "How do you know? What do you mean by _man_? I think this is just dumb gatekeeping, and you're a horrible person who deserves contempt", then I think your culture ends up very confused about human behavior, because minimizing the length of the message needed to desribe your observations (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length>) would require concepts to which the culture has assigned long codeword lengths ("assigned at birth"). But I can't prove it.

(I borrowed the "dumb gatekeeping" and "horrible people who deserve contempt" language from Brodski's blog post <https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/>)

I'm _not happy_ about the fact that this belief puts me in conflict with everyone in Berkeley and _especially_ the people who are _exactly like me_ except born five years later but I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do?

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Everest brain regression
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804

https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites

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Scott Alexander—
> It's hard to explain to people that yes, "we" have several billion dollars, but they still need to donate themselves.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/m0vob7/why_hasnt_effective_altruism_grown_since_2015/gqhvuop/?context=3

Maybe that's a sign that they shouldn't? Don't we want people to be making decisions on the basis of explanations?

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Pre-emptive dismissal as "unrepresenative" is incoherent: if it's not representative, how are you guessing what about I'm say?
https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/644563577202704384/your-experiences-are-not-universal-theory-of

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes


> the gray tribe gets its color by being the ashen waste of the blue tribe. Burned up in the misfortune of trying to actually compile the blue tribe source code
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/m0abd1/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_08_2021/gqvg6kv/

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copied from old conversation with "Wilhelm"—

the gender ratio between open-source vs. corporate software is pretty striking (~2% vs. ~20%); a hard-reactionary might argue, "women can't code, corporate women programmers are living in an astroturfed world and don't actually accomplish anything useful", whereas a more moderate position might be, "the sex difference in engineering aptitude is pretty small and women can do it fine when the appropriate incentives are there for them, but only men enjoy competing with each other for Internet Status Points"

even where people have evidence from personal experience, that evidence gets interpreted through the haze of ideology (for better or for worse); Katie lived through her husband transitioning, but she didn't have the framework to make sense of it until she talked to me

I was genuinely surprised by the race/IQ literature back in 2007; it wasn't that I was quietly knowledge-falsifying beforehand

> one man's moderate is another man's radical when you have political inferential distance

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I said: "Medical treatments aren't going to be harmful, or not-harmful as an objective binary; it's a cost-benefit thing. And things like osteoporosis risk, tenous thromboembolism risk, infertility, SRS complication risk, and the sheer inconvenience of being a lifelong medical patient are costs"
Someone in Discord said: I'll take those risks over the risk of suicide any day

... but that's if you've been sold the idea that don't-transition→suicide, which has been selected for emotional blackmail rather than being true

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/

https://4thwavenow.com/2021/03/16/dutch-puberty-blocker-pioneer-stop-blindly-adopting-our-research/

https://thepostmillennial.com/rob-hoogland-canada-prisoner-of-conscience

https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/12/06/the-sex-binary-is-not-a-western-construct-gender-identity-is

"Self-Medication of Paraphilic Ideation Contributing to a Pulmonary Embolism: A Case Report"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667296020300094

"liberalism of the gaps"
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/lk8abe/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_15/gnsbftf/

Blanch doesn't think HSTS is about getting men
https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1372918358639849476