+Do people ever really recover from being religious? I still endorse the underlying psychological motivation that makes me prefer the "call her me" conclusion, the _intention_ that made me think I could get away with defining it to be true. Now that I don't believe that anymore—
+
+[...]
+
+While [the Sequence explaining Yudkowsky's metaethics](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/metaethics-sequence) was being published (which a lot of people, including me, didn't quite "get" at the time; I found a [later précis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zqwWicCLNBSA5Ssmn/by-which-it-may-be-judged) easier to understand), I was put off by the extent to which Yudkowsky seemed to want to ground the specification of value in [the evolved design of the human brain](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSXZpvqpa9vbGGLtG/thou-art-godshatter), as if culturally-defined values were irrelevant, to be wiped away by [the extrapolation of what people _would_ want if they knew more, thought faster, _&c._](https://arbital.com/p/normative_extrapolated_volition/).
+
+And the _reason_ I felt that way was because I was aware of how much of a historical anomaly my sacred ideological value of antisexism was. Contrast to Yudkowsky's [casually "sexist" speculation in the comment section](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement/comment/vHNejGa6cRxh6kdnE):
+
+> If there are distinct categories of human transpersonal values, I would expect them to look like "male and female babies", "male children", "male adults", "female children", "female adults", "neurological damage 1", "neurological damage 2", not "Muslims vs. Christians!"
+
+You can see why this view would be unappealing to an ideologue eager to fight a culture war along an "Antisexism _vs._ Sexism" axis.
+
+Looking back—I do think I had a point that culturally-inculcated values won't completely wash out under extrapolation, but I was wrong to conflate ideology with values as I did—I was vastly underestimating the extent to which your current sacred ideology _can_ be shown to be meaningfully "wrong" with better information—and, by design of the extrapolation procedure, [this _shouldn't_ be threatening](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat).
+
+Your morality doesn't have to converge with that of your genetic twin who was raised in a culture with a different ideology/religion—maybe culturally learned values from childhood get "frozen" after reasoning ability kicks in, such that I would never see eye-to-eye with my genetic analogue who was raised with (say) a traditional Muslim view of relations between the sexes, no matter how much we debates and no matter how many new facts we learned.
+
+At the same time, while reflecting on one's own values and how to refine them in response to new information and new situations, the question of what your genetic analogue raised in a different culture would think is _relevant_ information. ["Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a[n ideology] discovers a sense of beauty in it."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession) However pure my heart was, my teenage religion got a lot of things _wrong_ on the empirical merits. When figuring out how to [rescue the spirit](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility) of early-twenty-first century (pre-[Great Awokening](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020)) egalitarian individualism in light of the terrible discovery that [_none of this shit is true_](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/), it's instructive to consider how you would have formulated your values, if you had always known the true state of affairs to begin with (even if, as a point of historical fact, your mistaken beliefs had a causal role in the development of the values you're trying to rescue).
+
+When I introspect on the _causes_ of my whole gender ... _thing_, I see three parents in the causal graph: autogynephilia, being a sensitive boy rather than a macho guy, and my ideological commitment to antisexism (wanting to treat feminism as a religion, as a special case of egalitarianism as our state religion). The first two things seem likely to be more "innate", more robust to perturbations—
+
+[...]
+
+Suppose it _is_ true that female adults and male adults have distinct transpersonal values. At the time, I found the prospect horrifying—but that just shows that the design of male transpersonal values _contains within it_ the potential (under appropriate cultural conditions) to be horrified by sex differences in transpersonal values. If, naïvely, [I don't _want_ it to be the case that women are a different thing that I don't understand](/2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/), but that preference _itself_ arises out of—something like, the love of a man for a woman leading to, wanting to be aligned with women in the sense of AI alignment, and genuinely do right by them—which vision is threatened by the idea of the sexes having fundamentally different interests.
+
+(During the vicissitudes of [my 2017 psychotic episode](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), [I wrote a note](/images/cooperate_note.jpg): "cooperate with men who cooperate with women [who] cooperate with men who cooperate with women who cooperate with men".)
+
+But what _constitutes_ doing right by women, depends on the actual facts of the matter about psychological sex difference—if you _assume_, based on empathic inference, that the target of your benevolence is just like you, you might end up taking actions that hurt rather than help them if you live in one of the possible worlds where they're _not_ just like you.
+
+The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/). [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)