Title: Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
Date: 2021-02-14 05:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
Status: draft
> _I'll write my way out
Now I am not a cognitive scientist, and can't claim to _know_ exactly what my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is, or where it comes from—that's [not the kind of thing I would expect people to _know_ from introspection alone](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). But it has always seemed like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between the erotic thing, and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, even if the two things don't _feel_ the same: the overlap in subject matter is too much to be a coincidence. And the erotic thing definitely came _first_.
-Maybe this story reads differently in 2020 from how it was to live in the 'aughts? I think that teenage boys in the current year having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—
+Maybe this story reads differently in 2021 from how it was to live in the 'aughts? I think that teenage boys in the current year having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—
(and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is _much_ easier to talk about than the erotic thing)
But it was a different time, then. Of course I had _heard of_ transsexualism as a thing, in the form of the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, but it wasn't something I expected to actually encounter in real life. (I understood my "tranny girl" song to reflect an idle fantasy, not a legitimate life plan.)
-At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—roughly analogous to how a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
+At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—[roughly analogous to how](/2017/Jul/interlude-vi/) a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
-[It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
+[It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical sexual psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body).
My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but there were definitely some SJW-like patterns in my comments, inherited from my time in the feminist blogosphere.
-[TODO: smoother transition: this was before Overcoming Bias, but it gives the flavor of my attitude—]
+[TODO: smoother transition from talking about antisexism to Overcoming Bias: the Amy Alkon song was before Overcoming Bias, but it gives the flavor of my attitude—]
-There was an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/ag-columns-blog/newindex.html), whose column got syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences. Since I knew that believing in psychological sex differences was _bad and wrong_, one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head went—
+There was an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/), whose column got syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences—the usual fare about women seeking commitment and men seeking youth and beauty. Since I knew that believing in psychological sex differences was _bad and wrong_, one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head went—
> _I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight
> So she can't give her bad advice
> Because the world's not girls and guys
> Cave men and women fucking 'round the fire in the night_
+Looking back with the outlook later acquired from my robot cult, this is abhorrent. You don't _casually wish death_ on someone just because you disagree with their theory of psychology! Even if it wasn't in a spirit of personal malice (this was a song I sung to myself, not an actual threat directed to Amy Alkon's inbox), the sentiment just _isn't done_. But at the time, I _didn't notice there was anything wrong with my song_. Having not yet been socialized into the refined ethos of "False ideas should be argued with, but heed that we too may have ideas that are false", I was still inhabiting the natural mode of lamenting the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad.
+
[TODO: this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/), Yud on "men should think of themselves as men" / "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html
As a computer programmer, I have learned to fear complexity and dependencies. If you've ever wondered why it seems like [all software is buggy and terrible](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), it's because _no one knows what they're doing_. Each individual programmer and engineer understands their _piece_ of the system well enough that companies can ship products that mostly do what they claim, but there's a lot of chaos and despair where the pieces don't quite fit, and no one knows why. (Maybe _someone_ could figure it out in a reasonable amount of time, but the user who is suffering and in pain has no way of buying their attention.)
-But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of _biology_, and I think I have reason to be wary of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and corporations, but the idealized Platonic forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.
+But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of evolved biological systems, and I think I have [reason to be wary](https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf) of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and corporations, but the idealized Platonic forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.
_All_ drugs have side-effects; _all_ surgeries have the potential for complications. Through centuries of trial and error (where "error" means suffering and disfigurement and death), our civilization has accumulated a suite of hacks for which the benefits seem to exceed the costs (given circumstances you would prefer not to face in the first place).
[TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598 ]
-Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! ([Especially](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [not](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) [clinicians](TODO: Dr. W correspondence).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
+Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
Consider this passage from Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53:
> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
+"It became obvious that explanation could not account."
+
[TODO: I also think about it nonsexually—my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—but "became obvious" is wrong. Contrast to androphilic type is a clue that this is not what brain-intersex looks like. Analogy to broken ankles—there's going to be a fact of the matter. Trust people are telling the truth about their own experiences, but can get the causality wrong. I used to cut myself.]
[TODO: more causal confusion in people I talk to. One said AGP transition could be possible but very rare, and the same goddamned person is on the record as being into TF porn at 19 when their dysphoria kicked in; or someone dissed Blanchard, but endorses Anne Vitale, which makes the same observations and arrives at the same taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language
If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to identify as trans, which could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
-To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as sex dysphoria is common (or has _become_ more common), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); it might not be as easy for a clinician to distinguish autogynephilia from "cognitive" gender problems in the grab-bag of all other males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
+To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as sex dysphoria is common (or has _become_ more common in the recent cultural environment), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); it might not be as easy for a clinician to distinguish autogynephilia from other sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_.
The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.
-[TODO: or at least, even if there are things we can't talk about, we should at least want to avoid dark side epistemology. Briefly tell the story of the Category War?—but try to keep it brief and not-personal; the focus should be on dark side epistemology, rather than re-picking my fight with S.A. or E.Y. (maybe don't name them, but describe the abstract dynamics and link). "Everyone else shot first." Wasn't what I was trying to talk about, but I took the bait. For me, this isn't just a "political" topic—I actually need the right answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off]
+Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about. Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) and [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
+
+So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
+
+So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia and transsexuality as an _empirical_ issue in psychology.
+
+[TODO: or at least, even if there are things we can't talk about, we should at least want to avoid dark side epistemology. Briefly tell the story of the Category War?—but try to keep it brief and not-personal; the focus should be on dark side epistemology, rather than re-picking my fight with S.A. or E.Y. (maybe don't name them, but describe the abstract dynamics, and demur that the full story is robot cult inside baseball bullshit). "Everyone else shot first." Wasn't what I was trying to talk about, but I took the bait. For me, this isn't just a "political" topic—I actually need the right answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off]
Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
> I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???
It was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice
-
+
Ziz's complaint that I'm siding with the oppressors in conceptual warfare
the political incentives propagate recursively, a phase transition: in a culture it's normal for AGP males to transition, any sub-culture where they don't is subject to attack as transphobic
I want to stay aligned with _actual women_, many of whom have an interest in excluding me and Ziz
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff