Title: Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
Date: 2021-03-21 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, ideology, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek
Status: draft
> _I'll write my way out
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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes), 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).
-Honestly, I've been pretty bitter and jaded about the whole thing lately, to the extent that I've been pejoratively calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase [due to Dale Carrico](https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html)) as an expression of contempt—although I should _probably_ cut it out, because that particular choice of pejorative makes it sound like I'm making fun of the superintelligent-machines-destroying-all-value-in-the-universe part, whereas actually, _that_ part [still seems right](/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/), and the thing I'm bitter about is how almost everyone I [used to trust](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) insisted on, on ...
+Honestly, I've been pretty bitter and jaded about the whole thing lately, to the extent that I've been pejoratively calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase [due to Dale Carrico](https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html)) as an expression of contempt—although I should _probably_ cut it out, because that particular choice of pejorative makes it sound like I'm making fun of the superintelligent-machines-destroying-all-value-in-the-universe thing, whereas actually, _that_ part [still seems right](/2017/Jan/from-what-ive-tasted-of-desire/), and the thing I'm bitter about is how 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.
(and I _really_ didn't expect to be blogging about this nineteen years later)
-(I _still_ don't want to be blogging about this, but unfortunately, it actually turns out to be central to the intellectual–political project I've been singlemindedly focused on for the past four years because [somebody has to and no one else will](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/))
+(I _still_ don't want to be blogging about this, but unfortunately, it actually turns out to be central to the intellectual–political project I've been singlemindedly focused on for the past four and a half years because [somebody has to and no one else will](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/))
-—my _favorite_—and basically only—masturbation fantasy has always been some variation on me getting magically transformed into a woman. I ... need to write more about the phenomenology of this. In the meantime, just so you know what I'm talking about, the relevant TVTrope is ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman."](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) Or search "body swap" on PornHub. Or check out my few, circumspect contributions to [the popular genre of](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/) captioned-photo female transformation erotica (everyone is wearing clothes, so these might be "safe for work" in a narrow technical sense, if not a moral one): [1](/ancillary/captions/dr-equality-and-the-great-shift/) [2](/ancillary/captions/the-other-side-of-me/) [3](/ancillary/captions/the-impossible-box/) [4](/ancillary/captions/de-gustibus-non-est/).
+—my _favorite_—and basically only—masturbation fantasy has always been some variation on me getting magically transformed into a woman. I ... may need to write more about the phenomenology of this. In the meantime, just so you know what I'm talking about, the relevant TVTrope is ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman."](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) Or search "body swap" on PornHub. Or check out my few, circumspect contributions to [the popular genre of](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/) captioned-photo female transformation erotica (everyone is wearing clothes, so these might be "safe for work" in a narrow technical sense, if not a moral one): [1](/ancillary/captions/dr-equality-and-the-great-shift/) [2](/ancillary/captions/the-other-side-of-me/) [3](/ancillary/captions/the-impossible-box/) [4](/ancillary/captions/de-gustibus-non-est/).
(The first segment of my pen surname is a legacy of middle-school friends letting me borrow some of the [Ranma ½](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD) graphic novels, about a young man named Ranma Saotome cursed ("cursed"??) to transform into a woman on exposure to cold water. This was just _before_ puberty kicked in for me, but I have no way of computing the counterfactual to know whether that had a causal influence.)
[It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical sexual psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
-You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing 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_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body).
+You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing 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_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body). I once [haughtily told my Diary that "I would never do 'drag,' because that represents a mockery"](/ancillary/diary/141/#never-do-drag). (Same rationale as why blackface is offensive.)
So while I was certainly glad to learn that _there's a word for it_, an obvious and perfect word for _my thing_, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard theory or the idea that _I_ might somehow be transgender.
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 _specific_ 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))
+Of course there are women with an analogous story to tell about the nature of their own uniqueness—analogous along _some_ dimensions, if not others—but those aren't _my_ story to tell.
+
I can _imagine_ that all the gaps will vanish after the revolution. I can imagine it, but I can no longer _assert it with a straight face_ 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_.
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."
If I'm being _really_ honest with myself here ...
-And I successfully make-believe that I can tell the truth with no consequences on my secret ("secret") blog even though at this point my paper-thin pseudonymity is more like a genre convention rather than providing any real privacy ...
+And I successfully make-believe that I can tell the truth with no consequences on my secret ("secret") blog even though at this point my paper-thin pseudonymity is more like a genre convention or a running joke rather than providing any real privacy ...
I guess I _want_ to be "a normal [...] man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing."
An interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—["erotic target location error"](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf)?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
-And this is actually what we see. Most men are attracted to women, but some fraction of them get off on the idea of _being_ women—autogynephilia. So if some men are attracted to, say, amputees, we would expect some fraction of _them_ to [get off on the idea of _being_ amputees](/papers/lawrence-clinical_and_theoretical_paralells.pdf)—[_apotemnophilia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria#History). Some men are, unfortunately, pedophiles, and [some fraction of them get off on the idea of being children](/papers/hsu-bailey-autopedophilia.pdf). Some men are interested in anthropomorphic animals, and [_being_ anthropomorphic animals](https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-hsu.pdf)—["furries"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom).
+And this is actually what we see. Most men are attracted to women, but some fraction of them get off on the idea of [_being_ or _becoming_](https://pashasoffice.blogspot.com/2020/02/is-autogynephilia-actually.html) women—autogynephilia. So if some men are attracted to, say, amputees, we would expect some fraction of _them_ to [get off on the idea of _being_ amputees](/papers/lawrence-clinical_and_theoretical_paralells.pdf)—[_apotemnophilia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria#History). Some men are, unfortunately, pedophiles, and [some fraction of them get off on the idea of being children](/papers/hsu-bailey-autopedophilia.pdf). Some men are interested in anthropomorphic animals, and [_being_ anthropomorphic animals](https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-hsu.pdf)—["furries"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom).
Recently I had an occasion [(don't ask)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general erotic-target-location-error hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are interested in arbitrary _X_.
> 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!_ Yes, it's cheating! Category-membership claims of the form "X is a Y" [represent hidden probabilistic inferences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences); inferring that entity X is a member of category Y means [using observations about X to decide to use knowledge about members of Y to make predictions about features of X that you haven't observed yet](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes). But this AI trick can only _work_ if the entities you've assigned to category Y are _actually_ similar—if they form a tight cluster in configuration space, such that using the center of the cluster to make predictions about unobserved features gets you _close_ to the right answer, on average.
+To which I now realize the correct answer is—_yes!_ Yes, it's cheating! Category-membership claims of the form "X is a Y" [represent hidden probabilistic inferences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences); inferring that entity X is a member of category Y means [using observations about X to decide to use knowledge about members of Y to make predictions about features of X that you haven't observed yet](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes). But this AI trick can only _work_ if the entities you've assigned to category Y are _actually_ similar in the real world—if they form a tight cluster in configuration space, such that using the center of the cluster to make predictions about unobserved features gets you _close_ to the right answer, on average.
The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a _very small_ diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know.
That's why defining your personal identity to get the answer you want is cheating. If the answer you wanted was actually _true_, you could just say so without needing to _want_ it.
-When [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends [said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was _more relevantly similar_ to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole strech of space time.
+When [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends [said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was _more relevantly similar_ to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole strech of spacetime.
Same principle when Yudkowsky wrote, "If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman [...] I don't think I'd call her 'me'". The claim is that psychological sex differences are large enough to violate the Lipschitz condition imposed by our _ordinary_ concept of personal identity. Maybe he was wrong, but if so, that cashes out as being wrong _about_ how similar women and men actually are (which in principle could be operationalized and precisely computed, even if _we_ don't know how to make it precise), _not_ whether we prefer the "call her me" or "don't call her me" conclusion and want to _retroactively redefine the meaning of the words in order to make the claim come out "true."_
-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—now that I can't take for granted that actual women aren't a somewhat unfathomable Other onto me—my world hasn't collapsed in the way religious people [tend to fear](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) when their most precious belief is threatened. It just means I have to do [a little more intellectual work](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility) to figure out what's actually right. [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
+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—even while 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.
+
+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—but the the ideology thing mostly seems like a _mistake_—albeit a beautiful mistake that I formed my values in the context of—and the process of figuring out how to do better would benefit from looking at the space of _other_ possible mistakes.
+
+["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).
+
+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)
-----
-Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird sexual obsession about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science.
+Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird sexual obsession about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real and therefore morally okay to believe in after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science.
-It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them). It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private and sensitive matters—like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights). But such an absurd scenario couldn't actually happen ... right?
+It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them). It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private and sensitive matters—like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights). But such an absurd scenario couldn't actually happen ... right??
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