1 Resolved: publish "Sexual Dimorphism" soon as just the first part, the political coda is too hard to finish in a timely manner and will have to be a separate post
3 TODO for "Sexual Dimorphism"—
6 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
10 A common trope in female transformation erotica (search for _tg caption blog_ if you want examples) is that sexuality "goes with the body": in these stories, men who have been magically swapped bodies with women, often express excitement or horror (depending on the story and the author) about the discovery that they're attracted to guys now—or alternatively, express gratitude that the woman he swapped with was a lesbian.
12 But how would that work? The experience described by this trope would be something you'd predict if sexuality was implemented in a separate brain module that could stay with the rest of the body even while the "soul" (the implementation of someone's personality, memory, _&c._) gets swapped out. But if the brain isn't actually modularized that way, the magical transformation process would have to do a lot more custom engineering work (to "fit" the brainware-construed-as-"soul" with sexuality-brainware that matches the body) to get the particular outcome portrayed in the stories.
14 _In principle_, it could be done, so you might think there's no _conceptual_ problem with the stories, in the same sense that there's nothing _conceptually_ wrong with Jules Verne's [pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon) of [novels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon) about flying around the moon. There are lots of technical rocket-science details that Verne didn't and couldn't have known about in the 1860s, but the _basic idea_ was sound, and [actually achieved a hundred years later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8). So why is it in any way is it _relevant_ that making the magical transformation fantasy real would be technically complicated?
16 The problem is that, in the real world, the guys who are jacking off to the _fantasy_ of knowing what it's like to be female, are being motivated by a variation in _male_ sexuality. If you were to _actually_ become neurologically female, it _wouldn't_ seem like the scintillating apotheosis of sexual desire and the most important thing in the world. It would just feel normal, in the way that actual women feel their own existence is normal.
18 In this way, autogynephilia is _intrinsically self-undermining_ in a way that fantasies of space flight are not. This doesn't in any way lessen the desire or make it go away—any more than [the guy who gets turned on by entropy decreasing a closed system](https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1049) would have his libido permanently vanish upon learning about the second law of thermodynamics. But it does, I suspect, change the way you think of it: it makes a difference whether you interpret the desire as a confused anomaly in male sexuality—the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—or _take it literally_.
22 Another clue comes in the form of the following conjunction of observations. One, I'm not particularly repulsed by my own body in real life. ("Vague disappointment, sometimes" isn't the same thing as "repulsion".) Two, my fantasies about having a female body aren't particularly, um, discriminating? On the contrary, if I had magical BodyApp tech, I would want to experiment with being different ages/races/builds. Three, the thought being transformed in a _different_ male body, other than my own, _is_ kind of repulsive—
26 Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body".
29 Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because
33 _ morality and culturally-defined values
37 "The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/),
39 > until men start thinking of themselves as _men_ they will tend to regard women as defective humans.
41 When I read the [systematizing–empathizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear, is [only a statistical difference at Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf)—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
43 "Everything is a system" to "I _think_ everything is a system."
45 I think everything is a system ... because I'm male??
47 "I often wish some men/women would appreciate": https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj ]
51 _ playing dumb initials anecdote
55 _ Vassar clapback anecdote
59 [TODO: my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
60 our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.]
65 _ AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2" (but phrased in a way that's agnostic about
66 _ more empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
67 _ If I want to stay aligned with women, then figuring out how to do that depends on the facts about actual sex differences; if I want to do the value-exchange suggested in
69 * Moral Error and Moral Disagreement
71 * wipe culturally defined values: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement (this might have to go after Failed-Utopia #4-2)
72 * https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession "Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a profession discovers a sense of beauty in it." same thing with an ideology; http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/
73 * the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
74 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
83 * papal infallability / Eliezer Yudkowsky facts
84 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
85 Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
88 * Scott Alexander Understands Language
90 cooperate with men who cooperate with women
92 Terminology/vocab to explain before use—
93 * Singularity/paperclip/Methods/existential risk
94 * "non-exclusively androphilic" / nonhomosexual
96 "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (need to use it somewhere, and this is my capstone)
98 * everyone who wants to talk about AGP to call us predators
102 * claims to victimhood are leveraged into claims to power
104 * I need to put this behind me
106 * not a theory of trans men
108 * [the autogynephilic analogue of romantic love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
113 https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj
115 I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007
117 Aren't those trans women going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious
119 like the time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
121 [AGP is used as a weapon, but I think it's an actual claim]
123 [TODO: Freaky Friday, differentiating between "my type" and transition goals anecdotes—maybe cis people can be fooled into not knowing what that means, but _I know what that means_]
125 [the political incentives propagate recursively, a phase transition: in a culture it's normal for AGP males to transition, any sub-culture where they don't is subject to attack as transphobic I want to stay aligned with _actual women_, many of whom have an interest in excluding me]
127 https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/
129 the causal theory here is _retarded_
130 https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
133 "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways. Tri-S was explicitly not for transsexuals
135 > The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles… yep, looks like it.) <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Gay-and-Lesbian-Families-Are-Happier-than-Heterosexual-Ones-77094.shtml>
137 Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_.
139 * EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
141 * Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different
146 https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
148 Normal straight men also have positive-valence thoughts about women when they're not immediately horny.
150 my vocabulary is trained on the robot cult really hard; I can't talk to anyone else
154 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/autogynephilia-is-vaguely-defined/
158 https://carcinisation.com/2015/06/03/the-memetic-commons/
160 "never advocate" https://graymirror.substack.com/p/glasnost-and-perestroika
162 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."
164 (write script to extract links, with useful argparse, incl. dropping into a Python shell)
168 no safe defense https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
170 _ finding things in the refrigerator https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pL3To6G42AeihNtaN/rational-vs-scientific-ev-psych
171 _ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
173 * make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
174 * the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/10/hobbyhorse-apology/
175 [TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]
176 * stress fracture vs. sprain: psychology is more complicated, but the basic moral holds
177 * "I don't care" "It sounds like you do care"
178 * pronouns do have truth conditions
179 * The text of this blog post is not something a woman could have written
182 * The lie will rot, maybe ppl will be honest after the convention has set in??
184 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NHPD3dLFNk9QE2Y/search-versus-design-1
185 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBFHzfPkXHB2XfDGj/evolution-of-modularity
188 the [Sara Bareilles tune I chose as the breakup song](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) is probably etched deeper into my auditory cortex than my mother's voice
190 if my only choices of reading material are radfems who think I'm awful and trans activists who think I DON'T EXIST (!?!?!!?!), I actually feel better about the radfems
194 people colluding to maintain a thin layer of social constructions; lies to cis people
196 [sympathetic minds gay couples anecdote]
200 (This attempted nickname-change turned out to be a terrible idea for several reasons: first, my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); second, I found it incredibly psychologically stressful for some people to know me by one name, and people I knew before to know me by another, and I didn't have the guts to nag people in the latter group to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; third, the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly didn't hold up in practice because my real first initial (not _M._; this blog is under a pen name) is a high-Scrabble-score letter that begins one high-frequency boy name (top 200 in the [1990 Census list](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/1990_census/1990_census_namefiles.html)), and no high-frequency girl names (the most popular candidates trailing my ugly boy-name in frequency by an order of magnitude). But it was the _principle!_)
203 "different thing that I don't understand" /2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/
206 Be careful to phrase the early part as about _me_, and only point fingers at trans women in the coda
208 My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often, but in such a vast, sprawling body of work as the Sequences, it occasionally turned out to be relevant in a discussion of evolution or human values.
210 I ... need to write more about the phenomenology of this. I don't think the details are that important here? Maybe read the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman" TV Tropes page](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) and consider that the page wouldn't have so many entries if some male writers didn't have a reason to be _extremely interested_ in _that particular fantasy scenario_.
212 "It is said that parents do all the things they tell their children not to do, which is how they know not to do them." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DwtYPRuCxpXTrzG9m/my-wild-and-reckless-youth
214 "don't ask me how I know this, and I won't tell you" https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/AeBfaMZt7e7ye38Hw/open-thread-november-1-15-2012#comment-ib37xYqDnJgxE285R
216 Men who _fantasize about_ being women, do not particularly rememble actual women?
218 ([Amanda Marcotte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte) once described one of my comments as "cute"! It ... was not a compliment.)
220 , like drugs and sex, it wasn't salient to me as something that actually happens in real life, rather than on television
222 (Where "girls" are the ones with a vagina, breasts, _&c._)
226 /2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/
228 [TODO: sentence about how "gender identity" was offensive to me, link to "A Beacon"]
230 https://web.archive.org/web/20200118114912/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/bookshelf.html
234 learned things in the wrong order
236 Anyway, I kind of spent the next ten years reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation—sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain—to try to seem not-masculine,
238 all the while assuming that my gender problems were clearly not the same thing as the gender problems of actual trans women,
240 because the standard narrative was that that's
242 up through 2016 I was grappling with these issues,
244 about gender identity being discordant from sex assigned at birth,
246 which was clearly not what my thing was.
248 I thought, essentially, "Gee, it's too bad this beautiful word which so perfectly describes the beautiful feeling at the center of my life happened to be coined in the context of this controversial theory about the etiology of MtF transsexualism which is probably false because everyone says it's obviously false."
250 inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar
252 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
253 writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
255 In the political world, "gay and trans"—the identity-modifiers "stack".
257 Etiologically, people who are "gay and trans" are ... straight.
260 not needing permission from another person
265 What makes it hard to think about is that humans don't really _know_ how our own minds work. Evolution endowed us with certain capacities for making sense of the world, in our own way, when making sense of the world increased fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, but this mostly doesn't extend to making sense of the _mechanisms by which_ we can make sense of the world.
269 [stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)
274 https://archive.is/7Wolo
275 > the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
276 Namespace's point about the two EYs
278 link back to Murray review: can't oppress people on the basis of sex if sex _doesn't exist_
280 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/
283 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
285 If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
287 people like me being incentivized to identify as part of a political pressure group that attempts to leverage claims of victimhood into claims on power
289 [fallacy of compression _ironed in to the culture_, that resists attempts to deconfuse]
291 [I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]
293 [TODO: two-types as a first approximation]
295 [TODO: others like me, gender of the gaps]
297 [TODO: the last sequence was "Craft and the Community", which has aged by far the worst—part of the robot cult's "common interest of many causes" was getting everything right, including reformulating trans ideology to be sane, which should benefit everyone because of dark-side-epistemology—but that's not realistic]
299 [TODO: are we getting new recruits? A lot of the names I see are old]
301 Yudkowsky says trans rights!
303 This doesn't pass the smell test. This doesn't pass the _laugh_ test.
305 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters
306 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition
308 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length
310 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge
312 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as-curiosity-stopper
315 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MkKcnPdTZ3pQ9F5yC/cryonics-without-freezers-resurrection-possibilities-in-a
316 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hJPh8XyJ3fTK2hLFJ/three-dialogues-on-identity
318 "I'm not from around here; I'm from another dimension"
320 activity group selecting on T ...
322 But the angle between the line between me and my sister, and the line between me and my female analogue, is the [arctangent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_trigonometric_functions) of the difference-between-same-sex-siblings and the difference-between-sexes, which is small if sex differences are a lot larger than same-sex sibling differences (with respect to whatever metric on personspace we're using).
324 [the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
325 http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/
327 address GI->AGP direction
329 (The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
332 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
334 I'm not objecting to your existence, I'm only objecting to the prerequisites to your existence
336 (See Tailcalled on "zooming in" on the typology to at least a four node graph.)
338 But once you stop taking the "gender identity"/"woman trapped in a man's body" story as _axiom_ and
340 It's possible to disagree with people's _theoretical account_ of their own psychology, without doubting the honesty of their self-report, in the sense that people are doing their best to translate the ineffable _qualia_ of their experience into words.
342 [throw a chair](/2019/Jan/use-it-or-lose-it/) and yell, "How dumb do you think we are?!"
344 The claim is not that the trans woman who describes her experience as an "internal sense of her own gender" is lying.
346 If someone claims to have an inter
348 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
350 You might ask, what do I mean by "as a first approximation"?
352 /2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/#a-thing-about-me
355 > The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
356 http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
358 > The realization blasted through Harry like a vast dam breaking, releasing out all its water, bursting through his mind in an irresistible flood that swept everything away.
359 > There is only one reality that generates all of the observations.
361 (http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/104)
363 It's not a gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as a gender identity
365 The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"
367 https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
372 Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
374 But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
376 [dark side epistemology, what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"]
382 This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)
386 /2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/
387 /2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/
392 even after taking into account that the phrase "once you know what to look for" is a 20-meter fire-truck-red flag for [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positive-bias-look-into-the-dark).
396 complicit with cissexism:
397 /2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
398 /2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
400 I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
402 **Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** I'm _not_ trying to tell other people how to live their lives, because _that would be crazy_. I am obviously _not smart enough_ to tell other people what they should do _and get the right answer_. True, I am skeptical of currently-popular _theories_ of how gender works and how gender dysphoria works,[^concepts] because I think they are _false_ in certain knowable aspects and that I have a more accurate view in certain knowable aspects. That is _not the same thing_ as telling people to detransition! Maybe lots _more_ people should transition! But in order to _figure out_ what the correct decisions are—or what the best decisions are conditional on your axiomatic subjective values—we need to **get the theory right**.
404 Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
406 The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about in Berkeley 2020.
408 If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these clever category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language (pronouns and more) because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument, but using the _same_ ordinary word-choice algorithms that they used for everything else.
410 I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend "Irene" a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman."
414 Perhaps so. But back in 2009, **we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.**
416 **To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**
420 [cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
422 https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
425 "You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!"
426 https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/
428 The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
429 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
431 The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
433 A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
435 A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
439 The real alignment-theory lesson is about :
440 [TODO: the point it about unforeseen maximum, and for the purposes of a dramatic story, it's OK to focus on the big separating hyperplane, even if there are many other hyperplanes]
441 [TODO: "Interpersonal Entanglement" suggests a negotiation]
445 [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement),
448 (Though I think I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience: I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
454 https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
457 One man willing to make an extraordinary effort
459 You've got to ask yourself one question.
461 Just _how dumb_ do you think we are? [_Defect!_](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/)
464 Stereotypically, heterosexual marriages tend not to last when the AGP husband's eggshell cracks.
467 In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch.
469 Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other.
471 better than pretending not to have a theory
474 but let me start with the simple story first.)
478 (Where psychology is complicated enough such that there's much more to be said about what , and what better approximations would look like, but simple theories that [explain a lot of our observations](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) are .)
480 Tail's criticism of the draft—
481 > I think one can't come to the conclusion that the erotic thing caused the sacred self-identity without a prior like "sexual things tend to be earlier in the causality"
482 > Without further information, or even if the information one has includes time differences, the assumption should A L W A Y S be confounding rather than direct causation, since confounding is a priori more likely
484 > [about confounding, I should link—] https://www.gwern.net/Causality
486 > So there's some contexts - modelling your behavior, mainly - where she would not be the same person. But there might be other contexts, such as caring about her, social commitments, and subjective experience, where she might be the same person (depending on stuff - e.g. if you suddenly turned into the opposite sex, this would probably make it easier to bail on all your existing social commitments - but assuming you don't, and that you're allowed not to, they'd still be there)
488 > Anne Vitale makes different causal claims
489 > Less well-founded, yes, though I don't think they're less well-founded wothout the observation that sexuality usually causes other desires
491 > [claim that] sexuality reflects hidden desires (rather than causing them)
493 > Not just vary more independently; that's part of it but a more important part is the ages where they apply
495 > They might not have an alternative, they might instead think you are privileging the hypothesis, and that there's so much uncertainty that you can't figure it out
497 > You tell a rationalist about autogynephilia and there's a good chance he privately thinks "oh yeah I have those fantasies"
498 > You tell him that it explains transsexuality... Might he then not privately go "wait, that can't be right, I don't want to be a woman"
499 > Surveys indicate that on the order of 50% of rationalists are AGP, idk how many admit to being AGP in the private conversations you have with them about the typology, but if it's less than 50% there might be some who have additional reasons to disbelieve that they're not telling you
501 > You most likely have a positive residual of gender issues, relative to your AGP
502 > I jokingly equate this positive residual with MIGI in my mathematical implications blog post
504 there might be a lot of AGP-transitioners in the win condition
505 just not the kind that enter women's bike races and gloat about it
509 Everyone else shot first
513 > First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
514 https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html
518 Cross-gender identity is a virtually sustained or intermittently occurring wishful fantasy about being a person of the opposite sex.” Freund, K., Steiner, B.W. & Chan, S. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63 (1982). DOI: 10.1007/BF01541365
520 twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences
522 Reading the things I do, and talking to the people I do, I see this pattern _over and over and over_ again, where non-exclusively-androphilic trans women will, in the right context, describe experiences that _sound_ a lot like mine—having this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing about the idea of being female, but also, separately, this erotic thing on the same theme—but then _somehow_ manage to interpret the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an inner "gender" and presumed brain-intersex condition, which I just—can't take seriously. (Even before contrasting to the early-onset type, which is what a brain-intersex condition _actually_ looks like.)
524 All I've been trying to say is that, _in particular_, the word "woman" is such a noun.
526 It _follows logically_ that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if you want people to agree to that word usage, you need to be able to _argue_ for why it makes sense; you can't just _define_ it to be true, and this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to stigmatize trans people.
528 > Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 10:04 PM
529 > So Katie and Seanan did end up coming over last night, but I wasn't very fun to be around because I was emotionally floored because Michael Vassar (!) said that something I said in an _Overcoming Bias_ comment thread was really creepy and that his first reaction was that I should be banned. And I remember lying in bed last night or this morning feeling sick about it, and trying to think about something not thematic, so that I could relax--and I couldn't think of anything.
531 > But Vassar had a point, and I apologized, and I feel better now.
533 > So I am broken and I have made terrible mistakes, but in my rationalist's splendor, all I can do is try to understand the facts of the matter and do better tomorrow. This, even as in my rationalist's splendor, I must predict that this is unlikely to actually work.
535 > Michael fucking Vassar. Shit!
537 I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
539 > I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
541 https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
542 > damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
543 > I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???
547 [TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers]
549 Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598). I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers says Blanchard has been disproven, but that autogynephilia does exist _very_ rarely: "[i]n my now almost 7 years of treating transgender patients, I have seen this paraphilia only once in a person requesting MtF therapy", Powers says, going on to describe the particularly delusional patient (who wanted "the largest breasts possible", and claimed he needed to become a woman to please a Russian Instagram model whom he implausibly claimed to be his girlfriend) whom he denied informed-consent treatment.
551 You might ask, why am I citing Will Powers in support of my thesis, when Powers's testimony seems to contradict it? Only one case in seven years, he says.
553 I cite it because—surprise! _Powers was lying._ [In a November 2020 post to his own subreddit, he opens up](https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/):
555 > Every time I try and speak on this, I get attacked. People discredit what I have to say, call it harmful, and hateful. [...] I've previously stated I had one of these in my practice. I stated that, because I didn't want to push the narrative that it was common because I get literally eviscerated every time I try and talk about it. In reality, I see it fairly often. Almost once a month. Probably at least 10 times a year. [...] Continuing to lie about it and act like it isn't happening is a disservice to transgender people as a whole.
559 This comment in particular is really something—
560 https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/
562 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
564 https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/03/our-default-info-system-status-and-gossip.html
566 And because the brain and body are an integrated system, people's intuitive sense of [which parts are "me"]() and which parts are "just" "my body" (which can be swapped out without changing who "I" am), may be much less straightforwardly connected with reality than they'd like to think.
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