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)
If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty. I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/)
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/
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-https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia
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-testimony of female AGP
-https://discord.com/channels/745684950417932323/803338278492307518/1047261753177813034
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