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

Marketing—

To LW—

_(content warning sexism)_  
_(content warning transphobia)_  
_(content warning too much information about weird fetishes)_  
_(content warning WTF did I just read)_  

(November 2020, [TODO] words)


(You can also think of this as psychological context-setting for my philosophy-of-language Sequence's forthcoming two-post conclusion, "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" and "Motivation and Political Context for my Philosophy-of-Language Agenda")

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On Twitter—

WTF transphobic garbage did I just read?? Too bad Yudkowsky can't control how creepy randos on the internet interpret his work ...

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To SneerClub—

Hi SneerClub! I noticed that you've enjoyed some of my [previous](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/fw9cng/the_lgbt_activist_machinery_instead_adapted/) [work](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/61t94y/rationalist_tries_justifying_their_transphobia_by/), so I thought I would go ahead and proactively share this one with you, because (I'm guessing) it probably checks a lot of the boxes for top sneerable content: it's got Yudkowsky hero-worship, _and_ sexism (as many of you would define that), _and_ transphobia (as many of you would define that), _and_ weird sex stuff!

(From _my_ perspective, I'm pouring my heart out about the most important thing in my life, but if someone else with a different perspective would only sneer, then I can only hope to have been—if only for a moment, as part of a subroutine in the optimal sneer computation—_understood_. And for that moment, I am grateful.)

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B.F. on JKR (https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3883966591638029?comment_id=3884054068295948&reply_comment_id=3884243454943676):
> I am very glad that I don't have anyone with opinions similar to hers in my immediate vicinity, because I am pretty sure that if I did, my brain would constantly be running a scared loop in any social interactions with them. [...]  I think it's important that people can write essays that are as far outside my personal Overton window as hers is outside it (because sometimes they're correct and I should update, even though I don't believe this is an instance of that)

Duncan's voicing my concern: https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3890320517669303

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Points to work in—
* Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
* "The Opposite Sex" https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/
* EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
* Vassar slapping me down
* "Mr. Davis"
* Faster Than Science, Transgender Edition (prior draft)
* "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism
* study evidence that this is actually common
* AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways
* wipe culturally defined values
* finding things in the refrigerator
*  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

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Outline for remaining Coda—
 * you can doubt someone's theory without doubting their report-as-data
 * what "as a first approximation" means in causal graphs
 * people have a political incentive to deny, but I'm making a fact-claim
 * I would have expected the "rationalists" to be interested in getting the right answer (quote the "20% of the ones with penises" Facebook post), but it doesn't look like that's happening

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

[sympathetic minds gay couples anecdote]
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_.

[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking)


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(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._)

changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC

/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, 

I'm weird, but I'm not _that_ weird.

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.

"gay and trans"

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 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. 

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[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.

(Though 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:[^two-words] 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.)

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

_You have to let me show you what you are_.

> 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! 
http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108

> 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/

my pseudobisexual moments

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"]

(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")

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/

It Might Be Cool https://xkcd.com/535/