1 2021 significant posts—
2 _ Book Review: Kathleen Stock's Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (May)
3 _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data
4 _ Book Review: Charles Murray's Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (June)
5 _ Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
6 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
8 _ Overlapping Distributions and Cancellable Stereotypes (the standard GC argument about trans = stereotypes but with more math, why lesbians are women)
9 _ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
10 _ "Assigned at Birth" Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)
12 _ Book Review: Kathryn Paige Harden's The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality (September)
15 _ trapped priors—at home! or, theory of C.
17 Minor or Needs Development—
19 _ Student Dysphoria, and a Previous Life's War
20 _ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
21 _ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
22 _ Hrunkner Unnerby and the Shallowness of Progress
25 _ Link: You're Kidding, Right?
26 _ Link: Lease Bound comic
27 _ Link: Quillette on Sons Becoming Daughters
28 _ Link: Babylon Bee "It's a Good Life" parody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ALZgd6_Ek
33 _ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
34 _ Cromwell's Rule Is About Physical Symmetry, Not Fairness
35 _ The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
36 _ The Kolmogorov Option Is Incompatible with Rationality as the Common Interest of Many Causes
37 _ Simulationist Headcanon for Ontologically Basic Train Show
38 _ "Rationalists" Don't Exist (But Rationality Does)
39 - And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
40 _ importance of getting the direction of causality right
41 _ Memetics vs. Discourse
42 _ Multi-Level Moloch; Or, Technically, the Holocaust Was a Coordination Success
44 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture (working title)
45 _ How do unwind one's "rationalist" social identity?
46 _ Daniel C. Dennett on Near-Term Alignment Problems
50 _ agents with different learning algorithms would find it hard to agree on words?
52 Trading Political Favors Doesn't Build True Maps, But Correcting Errors Your Yourself Made, Does
54 (Rationalists don't exist)
55 > how to be a strong rationalist
56 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/4thPHxgBCvteQjLv6/against-context-free-integrity
58 _ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning / Casuistry Is Unbecoming: Replies to Eliezer Yudkowsky (I don't know how to do this)
60 _ E.Y. as case study on unconscious-lying and self-report ("their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints" https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228)
63 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung and the GPT-3 neuron about Trump: imagine a short story, where you suddenly become more villainous in the eyes of the narrative, and it's because a greater fraction of your measure is in simulations written based on an unfavorable view of your legacy (you're only aware of this because the GPT-descendant is smart enough to try to correct for it)
65 philosophy-of-language replies,
68 _ Reddit: /r/philosophy, /r/TheMotte, /r/theschism, /r/SneerClub
69 _ tags: "The SF Bay Area", "Criticisms of the Rationalist Movement", "Postmortems & Retrospectives"
71 _ "Cis" is like "gentile"
72 _ The Sex/Gender Distinction Was a Mistake
73 _ Complicity (how do reasonable people cooperate with each other instead of dumb people in their own coalition)
74 _ reinterpretting all of Hannah Montana album lyrics as an AGP narrative
75 _ Elision _vs_. Choice (working title)
76 _ Stereotypes are weak probabilistic inferences (Agreeableness d~0.5), category-membership is strong inference, the same word/signal hits both, but stereotypes are (or should be) easy to cancel; shifting default meaning onto stereotypes in order to suit trans (while still having the word attach to something) is a bad trade
77 _ Taxometrics and the Fallacy of the Insufficiently Relevant, Insufficiently Multivariate Experiment
79 _ https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3936528276381860 "Natural does not always mean good." — natural does not always mean good, but at our current tech level, that's actually a really good prior
80 _ Novemember 2020 Political Notes; Or, Sen. Kelly Loeffler Is Mostly Living in a Simulation Now
81 _ Phenotypic Identity and Memetic Capture
85 _ Yardstick abolition pessimism https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2018/11/13/gender-identity-isnt-a-box-its-a-yardstick/
86 _ reductionist rebuttal to "so you think lesbians aren't women"
87 _ Principles (transhumanism, and sanity)
88 _ reply to https://azdoine.tumblr.com/post/173995599942/a-reply-to-unremediatedgenderspace-on-reply-to http://archive.is/JSSNi
89 _ reply to https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/
90 _ Beckett Mariner Is Trans https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/in3g92/was_mariner_a_teenager_on_the_enterprised/
91 _ Cynical Theories review
92 _ Persongen/univariate fallacy/typical set
93 _ reply on psych prison https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4uvgb4/?context=3
94 _ Irreversible Damage review
95 _ Jessica/wiz AGP defense
96 _ Trans Kids on the Margin, and Harms From Misleading Training Data prior: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/how-many-trans-folk-are-there-really/ https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/getting-lost-in-the-crowd/
97 _ "More Than We Can Say": High-Dimensional Social Science and the Conjunction of Small Effect Sizes
98 _ Comment on "Towards decolonising computational sciences" https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14258
99 _ My Identity Has a Better Brier Score Than Your Identity
100 _ TV Review: "The Trouble With Edward"
101 _ Comment on "One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender Dysphoria" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-020-01844-2 (tag: `review (paper)`)
102 _ the scapegoating dynamic
103 _ review of "What's the Big Secret?" (acknowledges gender-role conventions which are more salient when people are wearing clothes, but then tells the real answer)
104 _ reply to https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2020/11/16/hermeneutical-injustice-not-gaslighting/
105 _ Comment on "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_timnit_gebru_and_google_megathread/gepcliq/ https://doxa.substack.com/p/googles-colosseum
107 - The Causality of Ethnic Differences in COVID-19 Outcomes Is an Open
108 _ follow to "Point Man": prosletyzing religion
109 _ Larmarckian Transmission of FtM?!
113 This is the same mechanism as "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"!!
114 > journalism is usually trustworthy because trustworthiness is the carrier vehicle. It's occasionally corrupt, because corruption is the payload.
115 https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/lje3nu/statement_on_new_york_times_article/gnfrprx/?context=3
117 optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex, even if your conscious verbal narrative never says 'and now I will confuse and intimidate people who want to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex'!"
119 I should email caption bliggers and ask if they know about AGP
120 https://www.imagefap.com/profile/rickbennett
121 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/03/swap-clinic-testimonial-i-can-work-with.html
122 https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/10/swap-clinic-win-win-win.html
124 reverse Wason selection task: https://twitter.com/ThetaGrunberg/status/1305296703088545792
126 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
128 (This needs to go into my "Motivations and Political Context")
129 Transitioning is easy if you project into the subspace spanned by "given name" and "preferred pronouns" and "frequency of wearing dresses." The problem is that it's not psychologically realistic to expect everyone else to just throw away all the other dimensions—people were using those dimensions!
131 (for Elision vs. Choice)
132 Speakers of my generation are more likely to say "person" when sex isn't relevant, whereas 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 mentioning race (https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) when it's not relevant.)
134 This is completely discrediting!!!
135 https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/
136 > they're not necessarily rejecting the seriousness of child abuse, only saying it’s not the kind of thing they build their categories around.
138 (My Identity Has a Better Brier Score)
139 I'm skeptical of "ace"—I think it's just an identity label that can be successfully marketed to otherwise-ordinary people in the bottom-quartile of libido, by an ideology that wants to sell people identity labels to get them to join the coalition of sexual minorities
140 You might reply: "But you identify as AGP, and attach emotional weight to that—isn't that just another identity label?"
141 but the thing about AGP is that, I actually have reason to believe it "fits" the territory of the underlying psychological variation
142 it's an expression of the theory that trans women (left-coded) and the subjects of that old Atlantic article about (right-coded) married crossdressers ("Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses") are the same thing
143 invariant under the cultural coding
146 _ Eugenics Is Actually Good, You Worthless Cowards
147 _ The One Where I Try to Be A Little More Explicit About What 'Autogynephilia' Actually Entails
148 _ No One Actually Wants to Change "Gender"
149 _ Ideology Is the General Case (working title)
150 _ Boundary Violations and Territory
151 _ three views on partisanship: "Hierarchy and Wings" "Bioleninism" "Democracy Cis and Trans"
152 _ Link: "AGPs! GROW A PAIR AND POLICE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_qFxtJ7pxw Karen Davis
153 _ Gay + Trans = Straight
156 _ Walker correspondence
157 _ 30 Years of the Blank Slate (Cosmides-Tooby/Pinker/Murray)
158 _ "I Hope You're Happy, California"
159 _ Travis's Trilemma: Creepy, Crazy, or Protected-Class (working title)
160 _ Reply to Ozymandias on Lesbians and on Single-Sex Spaces
161 _ Answers on Great Divides: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/questions-for-great-divides.html
162 _ Film Review: Your Name
163 _ World of Masks https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1228093035042541569
164 _ glomerular filtration rate https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gq50mo/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_25_2020/frvrhwg/
165 _ I Am Very Bad at Keeping Secrets and Am Therefore Very Reluctant to Offer Confidentiality Promises
167 _ starting to lose sympathy for my crazy past-self
169 "You're conflating sex and gender"—the problem is, Does anyone actually want to change "gender"?—they're bundled for a reason
172 _ You and What Army? Or, The Wisdom to Know the Difference
173 _ different ways of factoring a Bayes net of the same data make different predictions about interventions
174 _ COVID life-years (rather than deaths)
175 _ Signals, Deception, and the Precession of Simulacra (LW)
176 _ Contra Scott Alexander on Mental Illness; Or, Oh God, Please Don't (aAL/LW)
177 _ Comment on Wireheading /r/rational
178 _ Second Derivative (Paul Christiano on growth timelines)
179 _ Selective Reporting and Clustering
180 _ Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization—marginally neglected truths are more
181 _ Explicit Disjunction vs. Contradictory Arguments from a Bottom Line
182 _ How they Pin It Down: Equal Environments Assumption Edition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cXzTpSiCrNGzeoRAz/conjunction-controversy-or-how-they-nail-it-down
183 _ Social Construction is an Embedded Agency Problem
185 it's important to have language for psychology because you can't point to pictures
187 Training Data—"get used" to the new definitions, in time
189 "You can follow people you disagree with!" makes sense if you think of
193 if pro-reality trans people are allied with more numerous anti-reality trans people, that incentivizes me to join an anti-trans coalition, when what I actually (should) want is to cherry-pick the pro-reality people
195 another thing keeping me from trans-IDing: trans is "marked"; choosing it would mean associating with the crazy. Normal Society (with men named Zack) has its own madnesses and crimes, but
198 Vocabulary as Capital Investment
200 _ Challenges of Mounting an Ideological Crusade
202 B.F. being smart-but-dense
204 how taxonomy/typology emerges from Bayesian networks
206 _ On Being Stereotyped Badly (working title)
210 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/trvFowBfiKiYi7spb/open-thread-july-2019/comment/RYhKrKAxiQxY3FcHa
211 > I think sometimes I talk in a way that makes me seem more politically naïve than I actually am, because I feel as if the “naïve” attitude is in some way normative? (“You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?”)
214 The Wisdom of Nature (I like the idea of transhumanism, but in practice, biology is just too complicated) https://nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
217 _ Product Review: FaceApp
219 _ The Strategy of "Apartment Patty" — the outrage strategy only works if you have a coalition to back you up. Deterrent: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/case-social-media-mobs/612202/ Another example: https://twitter.com/jaimetoons/status/1271300265170186240
221 Psychiatrist's response to me is kind of case-in-point https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4valma/
223 you regress to your group's mean—but that depends on how you draw the category boundaries around group membership! This could be a good math post!! https://humanvarieties.org/2017/07/01/measurement-error-regression-to-the-mean-and-group-differences/
225 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia "An important fantasy for some individuals is being transformed into the preferred object (such as a statue) and experiencing an associated state of immobility or paralysis."
227 address accusation that I conflate "passing" and biosex
231 Positioning (don't want to prematurely alienate people you're trying to rescue)
233 conservatives complain about low-time preference ppl having too many kids—but from a evolutionary perspective, they're more evolutionarily fit
235 A Science Fiction Story Idea I'm Not Skilled Enough to Write
237 Names and Genders Are Not Relevantly Analogous
239 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia didn't make it into Lawrence's erotic target location paper, did it?
243 Anne Lawrence on AGP Teen Transition
244 Anne Lawrence on Unapologetic Autogynephilic Transsexualism
246 Butting Heads; Or, Selective Reporting and the Tragedy of Cause Prioritization
250 explain my blunder in https://twitter.com/jessi_cata/status/1188567229987577856
252 reply to https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
254 testimony on trans girl periods: http://www.onwednesdays.net/trans-girl-periods/
259 Reading Comprehension Is Rape Culture
261 Reply to David R. MacIver on Gendering
263 Trying to Be Explicit
265 Instrumental Categories, and War
267 (lit-search strategy: go through the del Guidice "Multivariate Misgivings" article and its citations; the Archer paper also mentioned this)
269 Commentary on "Blegg Mode"
271 Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
273 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode)
275 karaoke, celebrity, cognitive load; I don't want people to do that for me
277 Option<String>?! https://web.archive.org/web/20160731010249/https://qntm.org/gay
280 _ "Lies to Cis People", a.k.a., "Lies"
281 _ I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
284 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-have-about-five-words : well, that explains the TWAW mantra
286 The Parable of the Good Witch
288 First-Offender Models and the Unilateralist's Blessing
289 The Parable of the Faithful Man and the Cowardly Priest
291 Game Theory of "Apartment Patty"
293 Virtue Signaling Is Costly and Honest
294 (in response to Kosoy's objection)
296 Servants of the Egregore (write-up of egregore theory as told by "Wilhelm")
298 Kolmogorov's Iron Triangle; Or, the Not-Being-a-Worthless-Coward Option (epigraph quote: Raleigh's "The Lie")—(include analogy: the fear that atheism would lead to immortality given that ppl don't have to fear Hell, wouldn't have seemed obviously absurd at the time) — honesty, ability to think, and mainstream credibility. The Kolmogorov option sacrifices a lot of honesty in exchange for mainstream credibility. This might seem like a good trade until you consider that "honesty" and "ability to think" aren't independent (because people are bad at compartmentalization and we need to talk to each other to think together).
300 Research Question: Complicity
303 Where to Segment a Conversation When There's Stuff You Won't Touch, Without Violating the Virtue of Evenness
304 In Praise of Cartesianism (you need to _really_ understand "A Human's Guide to Words" before you can do high-grade good-faith social constructionism)
306 Sex Differences and Commonsense Priors (I have parsimony intuitions that make "AGP is caused by pollution" or "AGP is normal in cis women" or "hormone receptors distributions are the same" seem not worth considering)
308 In the Presence of Mimickry, Extension and Intension Simplicity Trade-Off
310 Objectivity as a Rhetorical Strategy: probability, words, morality
311 Focus on the Simple Case (accurate maps can have bad effects, but that's a weird second-order analysis)
314 A Human's Abridged Guide to Gender Words
318 in a world where we _actually had_ sex change technology, self-identity doctrine _wouldn't even occur to anyone_
320 Operationalization of Bad Faith: if people make reasoning errors that they wouldn't make with another topic having the same underlying structure
324 The Charity Convergence Trap
332 a big essay about Batesian mimickry
335 _ Codes of Convergence; Or, Smile More
337 _ "I Will Fight [...]": LGBT Patriotism and the Moral Fine-Tuning Objection
344 _ The View From Nowhere
348 _ reply to Ozy on https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-is-bad-science/ (when marketing in Culture War thread, maybe hat tip https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9cir3w/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_03/e5c1h2c/ )
349 _ Q An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History ...
354 ✓ Interlude XVII (not all men)
356 can the comment on "Bit Players" actually fit on this blog (I didn't empathize with offense at fake physics, but I can take offense at maximum-entropy psychology): epigraph quote, "It's Only a Paper Moon"
358 Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb; Or, Charity, Objectivity, and ...
361 _ Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition: Beyond Maximum-Entropy Psychology
362 Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
363 Q The Gender Czar's Compromise
367 Q Book Review: Nevada
368 Product Review: Oculus Go
370 All You Had to Say https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8xa97t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_09_2018/e228vyj/
376 Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
377 _ The Neglect of Probability Fallacy; Or, You Do Not Have an Intersex Condition
378 Q Simple Models Plus Noise Are Better Than Pretending Not to Have a Model
379 Falsifiability and What We Expect Not to See
381 Q The Hand I Was Dealt
382 "diagonalize" http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/ by running the research paper it was based on through it
383 Q Reduce Gender Identities to Gender Goals
384 Threnody for the Transhumanism of My Youth
385 of course trans genders are less natural; that's the entire fucking point
386 People Really Don't Know Why They Do Things
387 Q I Want to See You Be Brave
388 Passing Is Legitimacy, Legitimacy Is Passing
389 All Men Benefit From Patriarchy
390 (the story about my name)
391 Review of Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic
392 on the poor literary quality of TG captions
393 "Another Me I Haven't Met" (SacAnime cosplay review)
394 go back to east bay tg club night?
395 Product Review: Glamour Boutique's Vee-String Bladder
396 Q This Is Worth a Fight
397 "Trans Women Are Women" is a Positive-Affect Instance of the Noncentral Fallacy
401 story of Gina and Vern selected for GNC
402 story about women engineers and male businesspeople
403 story about race of humans who have a "sneaky" camoflauge form and someone with their analogue of AGP tries to deliberately lower his status to get it
404 fix fic for that one episode of _The Orville_