Title: A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
Date: 2017-12-01 19:50
Category: other
-Tags: anecdotal, personal, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: anecdotal, my robot cult, personal, two-type taxonomy
I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it _should_ have gone. (Narrative optimization should be a _deliberate_ process: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather rather than letting them get blurred together in the murky, unauditable process of reconstructing the scene from an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after.)
-A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which I had protested that gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)
+A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which [I had protested that](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/q6j) gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)
At some point (to my eternal regret, I cannot recall the exact context), she casually said something about my desire for social dominance. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she were commenting on something as innocuous and indisputable as my height or hair color.
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