I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this whole theoretical line of argument about evolutionary psychology doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around [quasi-religious _denial_](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9).
-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 I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to [minimize the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
+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 I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to maximize the accuracy of my probabilistic predictions.
Another one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head a few years earlier (which I mention for its being representative of my attitude at the time, rather than it being notable in itself), concerned an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/), 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. My song went—
> 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 views on 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_. I hadn't 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".
+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 views on psychology! (Also, casually wishing death on a woman does not seem particularly pro-feminist?!) 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_. I hadn't 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".
[TODO: Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html ; contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky: "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)]
(As Yudkowsky [occasionally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact on how they actually work. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, but he was just wrong; the theory did not _become true of him_ because he believed it.)
-What theory I end up believing about myself _matters_, because different theories that purport to explain the same facts can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.
+What theory I end up believing about myself _matters_, because [different theories that purport to explain the same facts](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.
If I have some objective inner female gender as the result of a brain-intersex condition, then getting on, and _staying_ on, feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would presumably be a good idea specifically because my brain is designed to "run on" estrogen. But if my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are fundamentally a misinterpretation of misdirected _male_ sexuality, then it's not clear that I _want_ the psychological effects of HRT: if there were some unnatural way to give me a female body (or just more female-_like_) _without_ messing with my internal neurochemistry, that would actually be _desireable_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff