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.
-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 want 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_ in my open-source programming scene are male.](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization 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. I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps will 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 _unlikely_.
+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 want 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](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/), [most of the _women_ in my open-source programming scene are male.](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization 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. I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps will 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 _unlikely_.
I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fantatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."
[TODO: But I do have enough evidence to know that the prevailing narrative _doesn't add up_. Serano's proposal makes no predictions.]
-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.
+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.
-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 )
+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, or at least be eager to _clarify_ 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 female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition
+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_.
+
+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, 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?!
+
+[TODO: make the dark-side-epistemology/Category-War case in a couple sentences without blaming anyone]
+
+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_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff