Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
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[TODO: rewrite/expand description here—"Sympathetic Minds" first, then bridge to "Failed Utopia #4-2"]
[TODO: mention that I'm responsible for the protagonist's name getting changed]
A single-variable measurement like height is like a single coin: unless the coin is _very_ biased, one flip can't tell you much about the bias. But there are lots of things about people for which it's not that they can't be measured, but that the measurements require _more than one number_—which correspondingly offer more information about the distribution generating them.
-And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. Certainly, I agree that almost no one besides professional geneticists interact with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes _existed_ before 1905. [(Co-discovered by a woman!)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens) But the function of [intensional definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) in human natural language isn't to exhaustively [pinpoint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing) a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AIs executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why [Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. ["The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the [SRY gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _is_ at the root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) underlying all other sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living _before_ 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been _right_. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty _well-performing_ definition—if you're looking for a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) that provides a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
+And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. Certainly, I agree that almost no one besides professional geneticists interact with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes _existed_ before 1905. [(Co-discovered by a woman!)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens) But the function of [intensional definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) in human natural language isn't to exhaustively [pinpoint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing) a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AI's executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why [Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. ["The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the [SRY gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _is_ at the root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) underlying all other sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living _before_ 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been _right_. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty _well-performing_ definition—if you're looking for a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) that provides a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
Take faces. People are [verifiably very good at recognizing sex from (hair covered, males clean-shaven) photographs of people's faces](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf) (96% accuracy, which is the equivalent of _d_ ≈ 3.5), but we don't have direct introspective access into what _specific_ features our brains are using to do it; we just look, and _somehow_ know. The differences are real, but it's not a matter of any single, simple measurement you could perform with a ruler (like the distance between someone's eyes). Rather, it's a high-dimensional _pattern_ in many measurements you could take with a ruler, no one of which is definitive. [Covering up the nose makes people slower and slightly worse at sexing faces, but people don't do better than chance at guessing sex from photos of noses alone](/papers/roberts-bruce-feature_saliency_in_judging_the_sex_and_familiarity_of_faces.pdf).
Sex differences in the brain are like sex differences in the skeleton: anthropologists can tell female and male skeletons apart (the [pelvis is shaped differently](https://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/sexual-dimorphism-pelvis), for obvious reasons), and [machine-learning models can see very reliable differences that human radiologists can't](/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf), but neither sex has entire _bones_ that the other doesn't, and the same is true of brain regions. (The evopsych story about complex adaptations being universal-up-to-sex suggests that sex-specific bones or brain regions should be _possible_, but in a bit of _relative_ good news for antisexism, apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Um, in humans—a lot of other mammals actually have [a penis bone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum).)
-Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which my mosaic is more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) ["[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples). If you _sum over_ all of my traits, everything that makes me, _me_—it's going to be a point in the _male_ region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male whether or not I like it and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies.
+Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which my mosaic is more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) ["[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples). If you _sum over_ all of my traits, everything that makes me, _me_—it's going to be a point in the _male_ region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't), and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies (I probably don't).
Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
But, empirically, I did grow (small) breasts as a result of [my five-month HRT experiment](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/), and I think it's actually been a (small) quality-of-life improvement for approximately the reasons I expected going in. I just—like the æsthetic?—and wanted it to be part of _my_ æsthetic, and now it is, and I don't quite remember what my chest was like before, kind of like how I don't quite remember what it was like to have boy-short hair before I grew out my signature beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (Though I'm _still_ [kicking myself for not](/2017/Nov/laser-1/) taking a bare-chested "before" photo.) I don't see any particular reason to believe this experience wouldn't replicate all the way down the [slope of interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/).
-Fundamentally, I think I can make _better decisions_ for myself by virtue of having an accurate model of what's really going on with me—a model that uses all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, such that I can talk about my paraphilic desire to be shaped like a woman without wanting to actually be a woman, similarly to how the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" aren't actually women.
+Fundamentally, I think I can make _better decisions_ for myself by virtue of having an accurate model of what's really going on with me—a model that uses all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, such that I have the language to talk about my obsessive paraphilic desire to be shaped like a woman without wanting to actually be a woman, similarly to how the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" aren't actually women.
If the _actual_ desire implemented in one's actual brain in the real physical universe takes the form of (roughly translating from desire into English) "You know, I kind of want my own breasts (_&c._)", it may be weird and perverted to _admit_ this and act on it (!!)—but would it be any _less_ weird and perverted to act on it under the false (in my case) pretense of an invisible female gender identity? If you know what the thing is, can it be any worse to just _own it_?
+If we _actually had_ magical perfect transformation technology or something close to it—if you could grow a female body in a vat, and transfer my brain into it, and had a proven solution to the motor-mapping and skull-size issues—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
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+(Though I think I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience: I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
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+Since we _don't_ have that, I don't think [TODO: finish pargraph ...]
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Even if I never took the beautiful pure sacred self identity thing too literally, owning it for what it really is—an illusion, the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—takes a different tone in the harsh light of my deconversion from psychological sex differences denialism. In "Changing Emotions", Yudkowsky wrote—
> If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don't think I'd call her "me". The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.
In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person (like me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday), but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force [the Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) to come up. What if you could _interpolate_ between two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both or some fraction of each of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) At what point on the spectrum would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has [a book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity) with lots of these.)
-People _do_ change a lot over time; there _is_ a sense in which, in some contexts, we _don't_ want to say that a sixty-year-old is the "same person" they were when they were twenty—and forty years is "only" 4,870 three-day increments. But if a twenty-year-old were to be magically replaced with their sixty-year-old future self (not just superficially wearing an older body like a suit of clothing, but their brain actually encoding forty more years of experience and decay) ... well, there's a reason I reached for the word "replace" (suggesting putting a _different_ thing in something's place) when describing the scenario. That's what Yudkowsky means by "the change is too sharp"—the _ordinary_ sense in which we model people as the "same person" from day to day (despite people having [more than one proton](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) in a different place from day to day) has an implicit [Lipschitz condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity) buried in it, as assumption that people don't change _too fast_.
+People _do_ change a lot over time; there _is_ a sense in which, in some contexts, we _don't_ want to say that a sixty-year-old is the "same person" they were when they were twenty—and forty years is "only" 4,870 three-day increments. But if a twenty-year-old were to be magically replaced with their sixty-year-old future self (not just superficially wearing an older body like a suit of clothing, but their brain actually encoding forty more years of experience and decay) ... well, there's a reason I reached for the word "replace" (suggesting putting a _different_ thing in something's place) when describing the scenario. That's what Yudkowsky means by "the change is too sharp"—the _ordinary_ sense in which we model people as the "same person" from day to day (despite people having [more than one proton](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) in a different place from day to day) has an implicit [Lipschitz condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity) buried in it, an assumption that people don't change _too fast_.
The thing about Sorites problems is that they're _incredibly boring_. The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap", but in the edge-cases where we're not sure, arguing about whether to use the word "heap" _doesn't change the configuration of sand_. You might think that if [the category is blurry](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray), you therefore have some freedom to [draw its boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) the way you prefer—but [the cognitive function of the category is for making probabilistic inferences on the basis of category-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), and those probabilistic inferences can be quantitatively better or worse. Preferences over concept definitions that aren't about maximizing predictive accuracy are therefore preferences _for deception_, because "making probability distributions less accurate in order to achieve some other goal" is exactly what _deception_ means.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff