Title: An Infovist's Advisory; Or, Standing Athwart History Yelling, "Wait! I Like the Idea, but the Execution Needs Work!" Date: 2020-01-01 Category: commentary Tags: epistemology Status: draft TODO OUTLINE OF POINTS TO HIT— POINTS FROM MY EMAIL TO BBL— * the current situation re MtF is crazy * activists who want to change society are both incentivized and selected for self-delusion— * incentivized because: ... ? (Exercise: what was I thinking when I said this?) * selected-for because: ... ? (Exercise) * some kind of Goodheart's-law/Berkson's-paradox-like phenomenon?? * Whichever activists happen to win get to write the history books, and so most people end up with this Whig history view of the world where people in the past were bad, bad men, but we're so much more progressive and enlightened now. But evolutionarily speaking, there's no fact of the matter as to what's better; there's only what won. * A lot of intellectuals try to avoid politics: if your only choices are the "maximize the number of trans people" coalition vs. a "minimize the number of trans people" coalition, then it makes sense to sit it out * But maybe there's a role for a more narrowly-targeted form of political behavior (making friends and allies, trading favors, alienating people, &c.), with the goal of just getting the correct theory (sexual dimorphism is real, societies have gender roles, there are these two distinct classes of motivation for why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone) in the standard sex-ed textbooks, but not trying to dictate what the social norms of who should transition should be, who should pay for it, &c. "Infovism" rather than activism. work in my "the arc of the moral universe bends towards maximum entropy" quip: https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154841793275199