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, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
Status: draft
> _I'll write my way out
This luck does not extend to antisexism. If the genome were a computer program, it would have `if female { /* ... */ } else if male { /* ... */ }` conditional blocks, and inside those blocks, you can have complex sex-specific functionality. By default, selection pressures on one sex tend to drag the other along for the ride—men have nipples because there's no particular reason for them not to—but in those cases where it was advantageous in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for females and males to do things _differently_, sexual dimorphism can evolve (slowly—[more than one and half orders of magnitude slower than monomorphic adaptations](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf), in fact).
-The evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers wrote, "One can, in effect, treat the sexes as if they were different species, the opposite sex being a resource relevant to producing maximum surviving offspring" (!!). There actually isn't one species-universal design—it's _two_ designs.
+The evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers wrote, "One can, in effect, treat the sexes as if they were different species, the opposite sex being a resource relevant to producing maximum surviving offspring" (!). There actually isn't one species-universal design—it's _two_ designs.
If you're willing to admit to the possibility of psychological sex differences _at all_, you have to admit that sex differences in the parts of the mind that are _specifically about mating_ are going to be a prime candidate. (But by no means the only one—different means of reproduction have different implications for [life-history strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory) far beyond the act of mating itself.) Even if there's a lot of "shared code" in how love-and-attachment works in general, there are also going to be specific differences that were [optimized for](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vpf46nLMDYPC6wA4/optimization-and-the-intelligence-explosion) facilitating males impregnating females. In that sense, the claim that "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other" just seems commonsensically _true_.
[TODO:
-* Amy Alkon song
-
finish bridge paragraphs/section ... this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex", and the metaethics sequence, Yud on "men should think of themselves as men";
I'm feeling really averse to writing this part because it hurts—
_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).
-In a miracle of science, someone made the observations to notice that human females have higher levels of [(8R,9S,13S,14S,17S)-13-Methyl-6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-decahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthrene-3,17-diol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol) than human males. In a glorious exhibition of mad science, someone did the experiments to notice that artificially synthesizing that ...-iol and administering it to males successfully pushes some aspects of their phenotype in the female direction: [breast growth and fat redistribution and agreeableness—at the cost of increased risk of venous thromboembolism and osteoporosis](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html).
+In a miracle of science, someone made the observations to notice that human females have higher levels of [(8R,9S,13S,14S,17S)-13-Methyl-6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-decahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthrene-3,17-diol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol) than human males. In a glorious exhibition of mad science, someone did the experiments to notice that artificially synthesizing that ...-iol (or collecting it from [pregnant horses' urine](https://www.fundforanimals.org/duchess-sanctuary/about-the-duchess-sanctuary/pregnant-mare-urine.html)) and administering it to males successfully pushes some aspects of their phenotype in the female direction: [breast growth and fat redistribution and agreeableness—at the cost of increased risk of venous thromboembolism and osteoporosis](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html).
For all that my body is disappointingly male and therefore ugly, it _works_. It makes the hormones that it needs to function without me needing to dissolve a pill under my tongue every day—without saddling me with extra dependencies on the supply chains that make the pills, or the professional apparatus to draw my blood and tell me what pills to take—without me needing to know what "hormones" _are_.
Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibition, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which currently has 100,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
-Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_.
+Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) with the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
-Informal Reddit poll isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing.
+Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing.
[TODO: one sentence summary from each of—
> 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.
-[TODO: Nevada. Nevada specifically dissess the Blanchard account, as do 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]
-
[TODO: Dr. Will Powers https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598]
-[...]
+[TODO: 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]
http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
But [the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world, and I expect honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, to at least notice how well it performs on all the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where, again, _magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, [you should be _confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) by the 232 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp—if the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they ever single out "it's probably just a fetish" [as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis)? And there's allegedly a whole "camp" of these people? What could _that_ possibly be about?!
-I _do_ have a _lot_ of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are obviously very important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors that evolve over time?
+I _do_ have a _lot_ of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are obviously very important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
-Cultural attitudes towards men and maleness have shifted markedly in our feminist era. It feels awkward to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the Univerity in Santa Cruz when I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions (in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_)—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
+Cultural attitudes towards men and maleness have shifted markedly in our feminist era. It feels gauche to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the Univerity in Santa Cruz when I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions (in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_)—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's account (in his infamous [Comment 171](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
-Or there's a piece that makes the rounds on social media occasionally: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at having one's feelings and observations being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?" the author wonders.
-
-"I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I’m not a boy.'"
-
-(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; the originally published version said
-
-
-which could provide a motive to identify with femaleness and disidentify with maleness, which could either 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.
-
-
-
+Or there's a piece that makes the rounds on social media occasionally: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at having one's feelings and observations being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"
+(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)
+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 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 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.
-
-[TODO: But I do have enough evidence to know that the prevailing narrative _doesn't add up_. Serano's proposal makes no predictions.]
+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" story as _not adding up_.
Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want.
-Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the smart serious rational people will either agree with me (in public), or at least be eager to _clarify_ (in public) exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of public knowledge forward together, in order to help the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
-
-Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answer in public _for ourselves_.
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the smart serious rational people will either agree with me (in public), or at least be eager to _clarify_ (in public) exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to help the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
-Men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
+Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
-[TODO: make the dark-side-epistemology/Category-War case ...]
-[TODO: contempt and political posioning]
+Men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
-The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2020 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
+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 as a cost), 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.
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?"
Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
-But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _does_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/), but
+But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect English "got it right" overall where Spanish or Russian "got it wrong."
-The thing I'm objecting to is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
+What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about [minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
-[TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
+I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
+
+But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "God of the gaps" that makes no particular predictions, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that makes no particular predictions.
In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
-In a world where
+In a world where we don't have magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods ...
+
+[...]
-[TODO: Anton on "be a lesbian by behavior alone"; contrast to coining "transbian" as a new word: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7 ]
+The thing I'm objecting to is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
-[TODO: it was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice]
+[TODO:
-I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins.
+https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
+> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
+> 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
+]
-[TODO: it's actually the same rationality skill of parsimony]
+[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking)
My sisters! I don't hate you! I'm really jealous of you in a lot of ways, even if I'm not following the same path—not just yet, probably not in this life. But [for the protection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) of everything we hold sacred, _you have to let me show you what you are_.
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