"Sexual Dimorphism": drop in "Should Bad Boys Win?" tussle anecdote

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

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

TODO for "Sexual Dimorphism"—


--------

Or there was the time I responded to [paraphrase P.G.'s comment] with [my comment] and Michael Vassar threated to get me banned, which 

_ Vassar clapback anecdote
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267438

I need a single paragraph that quickly hits these points:
* not understanding the difference between reasoned argument and demonizing the outgroup
* what G. said
* what I said
* Michael Vassar threatened to ban me: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267438
* this ruined my day crossdressing in front of Seanan and Katie

------------

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

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


* Scott Alexander Understands Language



Terminology/vocab to explain before use—
* Singularity/paperclip/Methods/existential risk
* "non-exclusively androphilic" / nonhomosexual

"A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (need to use it somewhere, and this is my capstone)

* 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

I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007



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



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

the causal theory here is _retarded_
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/




> 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>


* 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

_ finding things in the refrigerator https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pL3To6G42AeihNtaN/rational-vs-scientific-ev-psych
_  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
* the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/10/hobbyhorse-apology/
[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]
* stress fracture vs. sprain: psychology is more complicated, but the basic moral holds
* "I don't care" "It sounds like you do care"
* 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

 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

-----

people colluding to maintain a thin layer of social constructions; lies to cis people

[sympathetic minds gay couples anecdote]

-----

(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!_)


"different thing that I don't understand" /2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/


Be careful to phrase the early part as about _me_, and only point fingers at trans women in the coda

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.

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_.

"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

learned things in the wrong order

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."

inference by analogy—even if not all trans women are exactly like me, at least a lot of them are going to be similar

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.

In the political world, "gay and trans"—the identity-modifiers "stack".

Etiologically, people who are "gay and trans" are ... straight.


not needing permission from another person


------

 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. 

-----

[stonewalling](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters)




https://archive.is/7Wolo
> 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)
Namespace's point about the two EYs

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

https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/


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.

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

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

[I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]

[TODO: two-types as a first approximation]

[TODO: others like me, gender of the gaps]

[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"

activity group selecting on T ...

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).

[the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/

address GI->AGP direction

(The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)

Fit in somewhere—
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers

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

https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/

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)

It's not a gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as a gender identity

The level above "Many-worlds is obviously correct, stop being stupid" is "Racial IQ differences are obviously real; stop being stupid"

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


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.

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.

[dark side epistemology, what the math actually means in the real world from "Reply to Holden"]





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).



complicit with cissexism:
/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/

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.

**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**.

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 debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI

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).

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. 

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/).

—

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. 


In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch.

Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other.

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

Everyone else shot first



> 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.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html

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

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

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!

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.

>  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."

https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
> 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???

* Dr. Will Powers

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

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.

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.

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/):

> 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.

You might think,

This comment in particular is really something—
https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/

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.

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.

Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body". Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because  https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/yTdJm7JjPJPynwS3a

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)