Tags: autogynephilia, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences
Status: draft
-So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts to promulgate an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_—general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans—and, incidentally, to use these methods of systematically correct reasoning to prevent superintelligent machines from [destroying all value in the universe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile). Lately I've been calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase [due to Dale Carrico](https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html))—the pejorative is partially [ironically affectionate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness), and partially an expression of resentment and white-hot rage acquired from that time almost everyone I [used to trust](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) insisted on, on ...
+> _I'll write my way out
+> Write everything down, far as I can see
+> I'll write my way out
+> Overwhelm them with honesty
+> This is the eye of the hurricane
+> This is the only way I can protect my legacy_
+>
+> —"Hurricane", _Hamilton_
+
+So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts to promulgate an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_—general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans—and, incidentally, to use these methods of systematically correct reasoning to prevent superintelligent machines from [destroying all value in the universe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile). Lately I've been calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase [due to Dale Carrico](https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html))—the pejorative is partially [ironically affectionate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness), and partially an expression of betrayal-trauma acquired from that time almost everyone I [used to trust](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) insisted on, on ...
Well. That's a _long story_—for another time, perhaps. For _now_, I want to explain how my robot cult's foundational texts had an enormous influence on my self-concept in relation to sex and gender.
The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing doesn't _feel_ explicitly erotic. The thing I did in the day in class about writing in my notebook about being a girl, was _very different_ from the thing I did in my room at night about _visualizing_ girls with this abstract sense of "But what if that were _me_?" while furiously masturbating. The former activity was my beautiful pure happy romantic daydream, whereas the latter activity was not beautiful or pure at all!
-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_.
+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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zvu6ZP47dMLHXMiG3/optimized-propaganda-with-bayesian-networks-comment-on)_ 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 2005? I think that teenage boys in today's world having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—
—are immediately provided with "Oh, that means you're not a cis boy; you're a trans girl" as the definitive explanation. 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.
-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 identity". 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_.
This brings me to the other thing I need to explain about my teenage years, which is that I became 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_.
-[TODO: sentence about how "gender identity" was offensive to me, link to "A Beacon"]
-
So, you know, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out _The Feminine Mystique_ and Susan Faludi's _Backlash_ from the school library. Before I found my home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—_Pandagon_, _Feministe_, _Feministing_.
-(In retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from some practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends—I mean, to the extent that I had friends and not just books.)
+(In retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—my pro-feminism was an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from any practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends or whatever—I mean, to the extent that I had any friends and not just books.)
It also seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between my antisexism and the erotic and beautiful-pure-sacred self-identity things. True, the blank slate doctrine has been ideologically fashionable my entire life. In the sense that progressivism has been likened to a nontheistic state religion, I was a _very_ religious teenager. But there was presumably a _reason_ I cared so much about being a good pro-feminist, and hardly spent any time at all thinking about, _e.g._, racial justice.
-So, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ Eliezer Yudkowsky rewrote my personality over the internet.
+So, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ I fell in with this robot cult.
My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often at all, but in such a _vast_ body of work as the Sequences, it did happen to come up a few times (and those few times are the subject of this blog post).
From the perspective of axiomatic antisexism that I held at the time, this assertion is cringe-inducing. Of course most people are straight, but is it not all the _same love_?
-Thinking about it from my current perspective ... I mean, probably not? So, for the most part, all humans are extremely similar: [complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind).
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+I wasn't ready to hear it then, but—I mean, probably not? So, for the _most_ part, all humans are extremely similar: as Yudkowsky would soon write about [(following Leda Cosmides and John Tooby)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/pfc92.pdf), [complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind).
[...]
> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is _No_?
(To which I now realize the correct answer is: Yes, it's fucking cheating! The map is not the territory! You can't change the current _referent_ of "personal identity" with the semantic mind game of declaring that "personal identity" now refers to something else! How dumb do you think we are?! But more on this later.)
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+people like me being incentivized to identify as part of a political pressure group that attempts to leverage claims of victimhood into claims on power
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