check in

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md

More refs I could potentially edit in after the fact??
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
finding things in the refrigerator https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pL3To6G42AeihNtaN/rational-vs-scientific-ev-psych

-------END OF NEEDED SCENES-------

_ more empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8


* everyone who wants to talk about AGP to call us predators

* I need to put this behind me

* not a theory of trans men

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj



[AGP is used as a weapon, but I think it's an actual claim]



https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/



* EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)

* Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different

https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

my vocabulary is trained on the robot cult really hard; I can't talk to anyone else

nothing left to lose

https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/autogynephilia-is-vaguely-defined/

-----

https://carcinisation.com/2015/06/03/the-memetic-commons/

"never advocate" https://graymirror.substack.com/p/glasnost-and-perestroika

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."

(write script to extract links, with useful argparse, incl. dropping into a Python shell)

------

no safe defense https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science

_ 
_  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality

* make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly

[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]

* pronouns do have truth conditions
 * The text of this blog post is not something a woman could have written

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NHPD3dLFNk9QE2Y/search-versus-design-1
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBFHzfPkXHB2XfDGj/evolution-of-modularity


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

-----



[sympathetic minds gay couples anecdote]

-----

"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

"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

Men who _fantasize about_ being women, do not particularly rememble actual women?

([Amanda Marcotte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_Marcotte) once described one of my comments as "cute"! It ... was not a compliment.)

, like drugs and sex, it wasn't salient to me as something that actually happens in real life, rather than on television

(Where "girls" are the ones with a vagina, breasts, _&c._)



/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/

[TODO: sentence about how "gender identity" was offensive to me, link to "A Beacon"]

https://web.archive.org/web/20200118114912/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/bookshelf.html

heresy


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,

all the while assuming that my gender problems were clearly not the same thing as the gender problems of actual trans women,

because the standard narrative was that that's 

up through 2016 I was grappling with these issues, 

about gender identity being discordant from sex assigned at birth,

which was clearly not what my thing was.

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."


------

 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. 

-----


link back to Murray review: can't oppress people on the basis of sex if sex _doesn't exist_


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me 

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.



[fallacy of compression _ironed in to the culture_, that resists attempts to deconfuse]

[TODO: two-types as a first approximation]

[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]

[TODO: are we getting new recruits? A lot of the names I see are old]

Yudkowsky says trans rights!

This doesn't pass the smell test. This doesn't pass the _laugh_ test.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as-curiosity-stopper

Personal identity—
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MkKcnPdTZ3pQ9F5yC/cryonics-without-freezers-resurrection-possibilities-in-a
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hJPh8XyJ3fTK2hLFJ/three-dialogues-on-identity

"I'm not from around here; I'm from another dimension"


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).

address GI->AGP direction

(The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)

Fit in somewhere—


I'm not objecting to your existence, I'm only objecting to the prerequisites to your existence

(See Tailcalled on "zooming in" on the typology to at least a four node graph.)

But once you stop taking the "gender identity"/"woman trapped in a man's body" story as _axiom_ and

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. 

[throw a chair](/2019/Jan/use-it-or-lose-it/) and yell, "How dumb do you think we are?!"

The claim is not that the trans woman who describes her experience as an "internal sense of her own gender" is lying. 

If someone claims to have an inter


You might ask, what do I mean by "as a first approximation"? 

/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/#a-thing-about-me



> 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.
> There is only one reality that generates all of the observations.

(http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/104)

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/

This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)


cosplay—
/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/
/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/
/2016/Dec/joined/



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).

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.

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.

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.

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."



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.**

**To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**



[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]

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

R₀
"You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!"
https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/


—

The real alignment-theory lesson is about : 
[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]
[TODO: "Interpersonal Entanglement" suggests a negotiation]



[evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement),


(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.)



[TODO: ...]

https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf


One man willing to make an extraordinary effort 

You've got to ask yourself one question.

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/)


Stereotypically, heterosexual marriages tend not to last when the AGP husband's eggshell cracks. 


better than pretending not to have a theory

but let me start with the simple story first.)



(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 .)

Tail's criticism of the draft—
>  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"
> 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

> [about confounding, I should link—] https://www.gwern.net/Causality

> 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)

> Anne Vitale makes different causal claims
> Less well-founded, yes, though I don't think they're less well-founded wothout the observation that sexuality usually causes other desires

> [claim that] sexuality reflects hidden desires (rather than causing them)

> Not just vary more independently; that's part of it but a more important part is the ages where they apply

> 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

> You tell a rationalist about autogynephilia and there's a good chance he privately thinks "oh yeah I have those fantasies"
> 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"
> 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

> You most likely have a positive residual of gender issues, relative to your AGP
> I jokingly equate this positive residual with MIGI in my mathematical implications blog post

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

it's all so tiresome


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.)

All I've been trying to say is that, _in particular_, the word "woman" is such a noun.

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.

> Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 10:04 PM
> 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.

> But Vassar had a point, and I apologized, and I feel better now.

> 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.

> Michael fucking Vassar. Shit!


* Dr. Will Powers

[TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers]


https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/03/our-default-info-system-status-and-gossip.html

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.


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.

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.


Or there was the time I took issue with someone in the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section addressed me as "Mr.": 

Depending on the cost you assign to a misclassification, you could argue that he _shouldn't_ have assumed—high Scabble-score letters notwithstanding—but in retrospect, I'm _embarrassed_ at my prickliness: he assumed _correctly_. (Yudkowsky: ["I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance))

("only because of the demographics of this community")


My question was sufficiently mild that I'm not sure the anecdote is worth including—or I can't figure out how to make it fit

> Did you have any specific evidence that I in particular am male, or were you just relying on your priors, knowing the demographics of our community?

_ playing dumb initials anecdote
Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html ; contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky:

, something you should be able to ["consider [...] open-mindedly and then steal only the good parts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YicoiQurNBxSp7a65/is-clickbait-destroying-our-general-intelligence).

linking to the Twitter thread about chromosomes actually isn't fair; that wasn't the point EY was making (https://archive.is/y5V9i)