I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, "being a woman", but apparently I felt like being vague) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
-[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters were a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Trans-exclusionary_radical_feminists_(TERFs)).
+[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters were a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism).
It got 170 comments (!), a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Noreen" (who I had _also_ had an exchange with in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).
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-You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an h-index of 90" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
+You might think that famous scientists and professors have so many people clamoring for their attention as to be entirely unwilling and unable to field inquiries from rando bloggers, but it turns out the world is not actually large: famous people _do_ often personally answer their mail (if we're talking about "scientist with an [h-index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index) of 73" famous, rather than Taylor Swift famous).
In previous months, I had sent thanks-for-your-work fan mail to Blanchard and to Bailey, and later sent Bailey a link to this blog ("I didn't mention this in my email the other month because it seemed uncouth to self-promote in a thank-you message"). That seemed to have gone over quite well (Bailey shared the link with Blanchard, who [tweeted a link and screenshot–quote](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/830580552562524160)), such that I felt relatively less presumptuous writing to to Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence (and Kevin Hsu and James Cantor for good measure) about my new political project, where I was in favor of the right to transition on morphological freedom grounds, but believed strongly that in order to help people make the best decisions, it was important to be realistic about the limitations of the existing technology and about what the underlying psychological condition actually is. To the extent that my attempts to be realistic put me in the minority of elite opinion in Berkeley, I feared for our collective epistemology.
I could see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria" (actually doing something about it) in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex, instead of internalizing socially-desirable admonitions against trying (which were adapted to the norm of reaction of a largely dumber population), resulting in Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard [had posited "developmental competition"](/papers/blanchard-nonmonotonic_relation_of_agp_and_heterosexual_attraction.pdf) between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psychosexual development. Maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion?
-It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has very strong autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has some autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
-[^heinlein-agp]: There was that scene in _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where a man watching a woman perform on stage uses a telepathic link to share her experiences—but there was also an entire book, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read it as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
+[^heinlein-agp]: [TODO] Some of this is circumstantial [...] The scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Michael Valentine Smith uses his telepathic powers [...] sex change in "All You Zombies" [...] _an entire book_, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read _I Will Fear No Evil_ as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like æsthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
(Nice people doing their jobs!)
-Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed.
+Lex seemed to agree with my model, but also agree with "Kyle"'s action recommendations: the general model was that systems are corrupt and unFriendly, responding at every level to incentives for breaking things in order for someone to gain a little more personal power, while most individuals wanted to be good and were just going with the flow. If we could change the flow, they might help us, but they weren't going to see the error of their ways when even _Scott_ had [written about lacking the agency to not commit people who shouldn't be committed](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/05/the-right-to-waive-your-rights/).
I said that I _didn't care_ about not making life unpleasant for people trying to do their absolute best in a difficult job. I wanted "Roberta" out of prison. If the best way of accomplishing that goal was to be nice and make sure a lot of receptionists and nurses feel good about themselves, great. If the best way of accomplishing that goal means meant making a lot of receptionists and nurses feel miserable and guilty to the point where they have their own psychotic break and get locked up by their employer, I was _okay with that outcome_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff