Tags: autogynephilia, epistemology, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
-[This started out as a draft email to Scott, but I'm really unhappy with the way it's developing; I should try to sculpt it into a defensible public post instead—or make it a good email first, then a post]
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-on parsimony intuitions (re autogenderphilia and developmental psychology)
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> Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
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> —[Steven Kaas](https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656)
But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other! If I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain _agnostic_ about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an apparently empty garage. But to say that the no-dragon hypothesis "just seems totally wrong" ... ?!?!
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-> We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.
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-Someone reading this who trusted Alexander as a general-purpose intellectual authority ("the best of us", the "rationalists") might walk away with the idea that it's an open problem whether 50% binary predictions are meaningful—perhaps reasoning, if the immortal Scott Alexander doesn't know, then who am I to know?
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-But it's not. On this website, [Rafael Harth explains why 50% isn't special](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DAc4iuy4D3EiNBt9B/how-to-evaluate-50-predictions). I claim that this should actually be pretty obvious to competent quantitative thinkers, even if it's not obvious to the collective _SSC_/_ACX_ commentariat, and Alexander can't tell which of his commenters are competent quantitative thinkers.
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-I don't particularly fault Scott for this: [by his own admission, he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/). (And the vast majority of math people can't write as well or as fast as Scott. No one is the best at everything!) Rather, I'm saying that a culture that wants to _actually_ be right about everything would do better to _just_ focus on being right on the object level, without [wireheading on its own promises of being right about everything](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/).
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-(Incidentally, Scott himself is actually very good about [not trying to claim more authority than is actually justified by his performance](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). His fans should try to be more like him along this dimension!)
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-I doubt that's the same phenomenon? The thing about reports like, _e.g._, ||I have a female body in all my sexual fantasies (as reported by Anomaly above)|| is that there's an obvious explanation for that ||if you're _actually female_—namely, that your fantasy life is based on real life along this dimension—and that explanation is not present for people who are _not_ female||?
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-||I think the way to think about this question is to imagine that if you'd _never heard_ of this stupid ideologically-charged debate—would you need to _spontaneously invent_ the term AGP (or a synonym like _eonism_ as coined by Ellis in 1920 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Ellis#Eonism>) _in order to make sense of your experience_? If your _serious_ answer is Yes, that's _really interesting_ and I want to hear more. (Omega seems to be claiming this about herself, which is _really_ fascinating and my model _definitely_ loses some points for predicting that she shouldn't exist.) But I think _most_ females saying "yeah, sure, cis women are AGP too; it's, like, getting turned on by imagining other people being attracted to you, right? Seems normal" _after having been presented with the term in an ideologically-charged context_ are not really understanding the phenomenon in males that the term was originally coined to point to.||
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-A much better analogy is ||the thing where you, Linta, and Swimmer report fantasizing about being male sometimes. This is plausibly auto-_andro_-philia, and like AGP, it's actually _pretty common_—_e.g._, Person _et al._ 1989 Table 3 (<http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf>) found 10 percent of female and 13 percent of male college students reporting yes to "Fantasizing that you are of opposite sex".||
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-S. (she doesn't get it):
-> I do also enjoy fantasizing from the perspective of a fictional very attractive woman and imagining the inner details of a hypothetical other person's attraction to her; this is maybe a form of autogynephilia? (Though it is a bit hard for me to distinguish autogenyphilia from just getting turned on by imagining other people being attracted to you / imagining how other people see you)
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-https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8?sharing_token=jzX6q1NAJAY6-F_jSZ9wmfe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4WOO91AGBPQEW4W5GA-5HjFFBOW6MbqFHl6iM4xVsaD3DHcIMra_eBV8WQP5ACn0suHGXlnXqqAYAmkbrYzfglseOmxogZQqQ9SymDk_KPLQTlCvTiA2MPLdV_k8lldyE%3D
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-https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8
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-https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/no-women-are-not-autogynephilic/
+If we have a big causal graph with C at the root (E₂ ← E₁ ← C → E₃ ...) with real-valued variables, and someone proposes a theory about what happens to the E_i when C is between 2 and 3 or between 5 and 6 or above 12, that's very unparsimonious: why would such a discontinuous hodge-pause of values for the cause, have consistent effects?
-https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia
+In my worldview, "gender" (as the thing trans women and cis women have in common) looks like a hodge-podge as far as biology is concerned. (It can be real socially to the extent that people believe it's real and act accordingly, which creates the relevant conditional indpendence structure in their social behavior—but sexuality looks more "biological" than "social".)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff