Michael said that we should also develop skill in using social-justicey blame language, as was used against us, harder, while we still thought of ourselves as [trying to correct people's mistakes rather than being in a conflict](https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) against the Blight. "Riley" said that this was a terrifying you-have-become-the-abyss suggestion; Ben thought it was obviously a good idea.
-I was horrified by the extent to which _Less Wrong_ moderators (!) seemed to be explicitly defending "protect feelings" norms. Previously, I had mostly been seeing the present struggle through the lens of my idiosyncratic Something to Protect as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness. I was happy to have Michael/Ben/Jessica as allies, but I hadn't been seeing the Blight as a unified problem. Now I was seeing _something_.
+I was horrified by the extent to which _Less Wrong_ moderators (!) seemed to be explicitly defending "protect feelings" norms. Previously, I had mostly been seeing the present struggle through the lens of my idiosyncratic [Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) as a simple matter of Bay Area political correctness. I was happy to have Michael/Ben/Jessica as allies, but I hadn't been seeing the Blight as a unified problem. Now I was seeing _something_.
An in-person meeting was arranged for 23 July 2019 at the _Less Wrong_ office, with Ben, Jessica, me, and most of the _Less Wrong_ team (Ray, Ruby, Oliver Habryka, Vaniver, Jim Babcock). I don't have notes and don't really remember what was discussed in enough detail to faithfully recount it.[^memory] I ended up crying at one point and left the room for a while.
<a id="tragedy-of-recursive-silencing"></a>I agreed that it would be helpful, but realistically, I didn't see why Yudkowsky should want to poke the race-differences hornet's nest. This was the tragedy of recursive silencing: if you can't afford to engage with heterodox ideas, either you become an [evidence-filtering clever arguer](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kJiPnaQPiy4p9Eqki/what-evidence-filtered-evidence), or you're not allowed to talk about anything except math. (Not even the relationship between math and human natural language, as we had found out recently.)
-It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and my incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had [Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/) in the forbidden zone and I was a decent programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as [James Damore eventually found another job](https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849)). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves pushed toward the "Say Nothing" attractor.
+It was as if there was a "Say Everything" attractor and a "Say Nothing" attractor, and my incentives were pushing me towards the "Say Everything" attractor—but that was only because I had Something to Protect in the forbidden zone and I was a decent programmer (who could therefore expect to be employable somewhere, just as [James Damore eventually found another job](https://twitter.com/JamesADamore/status/1034623633174478849)). Anyone in less extreme circumstances would find themselves pushed toward the "Say Nothing" attractor.
It was instructive to compare Yudkowsky's new disavowal of neoreaction with one from 2013, in response to a _TechCrunch_ article citing former MIRI employee Michael Anissimov's neoreactionary blog _More Right_:[^linkrot]
There's another extremely important part of the story that would fit around here chronologically, but I again find myself constrained by privacy norms: everyone's common sense of decency (this time, even including my own) screams that it's not my story to tell.
-Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason AI alignment is. That is, in [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent it. The intent of privacy norms is to conceal information. But [_information_ in Shannon's sense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory) is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text.
+Adherence to norms is fundamentally fraught for the same reason AI alignment is. In [rich domains](https://arbital.com/p/rich_domain/), attempts to regulate behavior with explicit constraints face a lot of adversarial pressure from optimizers bumping up against the constraint and finding the [nearest unblocked strategies](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked) that circumvent it. The intent of privacy norms is to conceal information. But [_information_ in Shannon's sense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory) is about what states of the world can be inferred given the states of communication signals; it's much more expansive than the denotative meaning of a text.
If norms can only regulate the denotative meaning of a text (because trying to regulate subtext is too subjective for a norm-enforcing coalition to coordinate on), someone who would prefer to reveal private information but also wants to comply with privacy norms has an incentive to leak everything they possibly can as subtext—to imply it, and hope to escape punishment on grounds of not having "really said it." And if there's some sufficiently egregious letter-complying-but-spirit-violating evasion of the norm that a coalition _can_ coordinate on enforcing, the whistleblower has an incentive to stay only just shy of being that egregious.
Thus, it's unclear how much mere adherence to norms helps, when people's wills are actually misaligned. If I'm furious at Yudkowsky for prevaricating about my Something to Protect, and am in fact _more_ furious rather than less that he managed to do it without violating the norm against lying, I should not be so foolish as to think myself innocent and beyond reproach for not having "really said it."
-Having considered all this, here's what I think I can say: I spent a number of hours from early May 2020 to early July 2020 working on a private Document about a disturbing hypothesis that had occurred to me earlier that year.
+Having considered all this, I want to tell you about how I spent a number of hours from early May 2020 to early July 2020 working on a private Document about a disturbing hypothesis that had occurred to me earlier that year.
Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children—that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of behavior for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys.
Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly "pre-gay" rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults [has been meta-analyzed at](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf) [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) ≈ 1.31 standard deviations for men and _d_ ≈ 0.96 for women.) A solid majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria [ended up growing out of it by puberty](/papers/steensma_et_al-factors_associated_with_desistence_and_persistence.pdf). In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under [a "watchful waiting" protocol](/papers/de_vries-cohen-kettenis-clinical_management_of_gender_dysphoria_in_children.pdf)) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
-What made this shift in norms crazy, in my view, was not just that transitioning younger children is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision that was being made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though a supermajority of trans adults were in [the late-onset/AGP taxon](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-the-taxonomy) and therefore had never resembled these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids in our Society are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions[^narcissistic-delusions] of guys like me.
+What made this shift in norms crazy, in my view, was not just that transitioning younger children is a dubious treatment decision, but that it's a dubious treatment decision that was being made on the basis of the obvious falsehood that "trans" was one thing: the cultural phenomenon of "trans kids" was being used to legitimize trans _adults_, even though a supermajority of trans adults were in [the late-onset taxon](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-the-taxonomy) and therefore had never resembled these HSTS-taxon kids. That is: pre-gay kids in our Society are being sterilized in order to affirm the narcissistic delusions[^narcissistic-delusions] of guys like me.
[^narcissistic-delusions]: Reasonable trans people aren't the ones driving [the central tendency of the trans rights movement](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/). When analyzing a wave of medical malpractice on children, I think I'm being literal in attributing causality to a political motivation to affirm the narcissistic delusions of (some) guys like me, even though not all guys like me are delusional, and many guys like me are doing fine maintaining a non-guy social identity without spuriously dragging children into it.
But if the grown-ups have been trained to believe that "trans kids know who they are"—if they're emotionally eager at the prospect of having a transgender child, or fearful of the damage they might do by not affirming—they might selectively attend to confirming evidence that the child "is trans", selectively ignore contrary evidence that the kid "is cis", and end up reinforcing a cross-sex identity that would not have existed if not for their belief in it—a belief that the same people raising the same child wouldn't have held ten years ago. ([A September 2013 article in _The Atlantic_](https://archive.is/FJNII) by the father of a male child with stereotypically feminine interests was titled "My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It", not "My Daughter Is Trans; Get Over It".)
-Crucially, if innate gender identity isn't a feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [Toddlers are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but sex differences in play style and social behavior tend to emerge within a few years. There were no cars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and yet [the effect size of the sex difference in preference for toy vehicles is a massive _d_ ≈ 2.44](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf), about one and a half times the size of the sex difference in adult height.
+Crucially, if innate gender identity isn't an innate feature of toddler psychology, _the child has no way to know anything is "wrong."_ If none of the grown-ups can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people are supposed to believe in the current year), how is the child supposed to figure that out independently? [Toddlers are not very sexually dimorphic](/2019/Jan/the-dialectic/), but sex differences in play style and social behavior tend to emerge within a few years. There were no cars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, and yet [the effect size of the sex difference in preference for toy vehicles is a massive _d_ ≈ 2.44](/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf), about one and a half times the size of the sex difference in adult height.
(I'm going with the MtF case without too much loss of generality; I don't think the egregore is quite as eager to transition females at this age, but the dynamics are broadly similar.)
Notably, von Osten didn't accept Pfungst's explanation, continuing to believe that his intensive tutoring had succeeded in teaching the horse arithmetic.
-It's hard to blame him, really. He had spent more time with Hans than anyone else. Hans observably _could_ stomp out the correct answers to questions. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a horse could learn arithmetic, why should he trust Pfungst's nitpicky experiments over the plain facts of his own intimately lived experience? But what was in question wasn't the observations of Hans's performance, only the interpretation of what those observations implied about Hans's psychology. As Pfungst put it: "that was looked for in the animal which should have been sought in the man."
+It's hard to blame him, really. He had spent more time with Hans than anyone else. Hans observably _could_ stomp out the correct answers to questions. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a horse could learn arithmetic, why should he trust Pfungst's nitpicky experiments over the plain facts of his own intimately lived experience?
+
+But what was in question wasn't the observations of Hans's performance, only the interpretation of what those observations implied about Hans's psychology. As Pfungst put it: "that was looked for in the animal which should have been sought in the man."
Similarly, in the case of a reputedly transgender three-year-old, a skeptical family friend isn't questioning observations of what the child said, only the interpretation of what those observations imply about the child's psychology. From the family's perspective, the evidence is clear: the child claimed to be a girl on many occasions over a period of months, and expressed sadness about being a boy. Absent an irrational prejudice against the idea that a child could be transgender, what could make them doubt the obvious interpretation of their own intimately lived experience?
(Or so I'm imagining how this might go, hypothetically. The following anecdotes are merely illustrative, and may not reflect real events.)
-For one thing, the child's information environment does not seem to have provided instruction on some of the relevant facts. Six months before the child's social transition went down, another friend had reportedly explained to the child that "Some people don't have penises." (Apparently, grown-ups in Berkeley in the current year don't see the need to be any more specific.) But if no one in the child's life has been willing to clarify that girls and women, specifically, are the ones who don't have penises, and that boys and men are the ones who do, the child's statements on the matter may reflect mere confusion rather than a deep-set need.
+For one thing, there may be evidence that the child's information environment did not provide instruction on some of the relevant facts. Suppose that, six months before the child's social transition went down, another friend had reportedly explained to the child that "Some people don't have penises." (Apparently, grown-ups in Berkeley in the current year don't see the need to be any more specific.) But if no one in the child's life has been willing to clarify that girls and women, specifically, are the ones who don't have penises, and that boys and men are the ones who do, the child's statements on the matter may reflect mere confusion rather than a deep-set need.
For another thing, from the skeptical family friend's perspective, it's striking how the family and other grown-ups in the child's life seem to treat the child's statements about gender starkly differently than the child's statements about everything else.
-Suppose that, around the time of the social transition, the child reportedly responded to "Hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—something like, "practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local cultural environment" (where grown-ups in Berkeley talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). If you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.
+Suppose that, around the time of the social transition, the child reportedly responded to "Hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—something like, "practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local cultural environment" (where grown-ups in Berkeley talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). In the skeptic's view, if you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.
It's not hard to imagine how differential treatment by grown-ups of gender-related utterances could unintentionally shape outcomes. This may be clearer if we imagine a non-gender case. Suppose the child's father's name is John Smith, and that after a grown-up explains ["Sr."/"Jr." generational suffixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_(name)#Generational_titles) after it happened to come up in fiction, the child declares that his name is John Smith, Jr. now. Caregivers are likely to treat this as just a cute thing that the kid said, quickly forgotten by all. But if caregivers feared causing psychological harm by denying a declared name change, one could imagine them taking the child's statement as a prompt to ask followup questions. ("Oh, would you like me to call you _John_ or _John Jr._, or just _Junior_?") With enough followup, it seems entirely plausible that a name change to "Kevin Jr." would meet with the child's assent and "stick" socially. The initial suggestion would have come from the child, but most of the [optimization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7EcMhL26zFNbJ3ED/optimization)—the selection that this particular statement should be taken literally and reinforced as a social identity, while others are just treated as a cute thing the kid said—would have come from the adults.
-Finally, there is the matter of the child's behavior and personality. For example, around the same time that the child's social transition was going down, the father reported the child being captivated by seeing a forklift at Costco. A few months later, another family friend remarked that maybe the child is very competitive, and that "she likes fighting so much because it's the main thing she knows of that you can _win_".
+Finally, there is the matter of the child's behavior and personality. Suppose that, around the same time that the child's social transition was going down, the father reported the child being captivated by seeing a forklift at Costco. A few months later, another family friend remarked that maybe the child is very competitive, and that "she likes fighting so much because it's the main thing she knows of that you can _win_."
-I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation would look at observations like these and say, Well, yes, he's a boy; boys like vehicles (_d_ ≈ 2.44!) and boys like fighting. Some of them might suggest that these observations should be counterindicators for transition—that the verbal self-reports are of less decision-weight than the fact of a male child behaving in male-typical ways. But that mode of thought is forbidden to nice smart liberal parents in the current year.
+I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation would look at observations like these and say, Well, yes, he's a boy; boys like vehicles (_d_ ≈ 2.44!) and boys like fighting. Some of them might suggest that these observations should be counterindicators for transition—that the cross-gender verbal self-reports are less decision-relevant than the fact of a male child behaving in male-typical ways. But that mode of thought is forbidden to nice smart liberal parents in the current year.
Anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occurred to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and I'm not an expert on child development. And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who _was_ "actually trans" whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff