So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of at the time, and _of course_ knew that I must never tell a single soul about. (It would have been about three years since the fantasy started that I even worked up the bravery to [tell my Diary about it](/ancillary/diary/53/#first-agp-confession).)
-But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, where I started having a lot of _non_-sexual thoughts about being a girl. Just—little day-to-day thoughts.
+But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing that would persist for years, where I started having a lot of _non_-sexual thoughts about being female. (Or at least not-identifiably-male.) Just—little day-to-day thoughts, little symbolic gestures.
Like when I would [write in my pocket notebook in the persona of my female analogue](/images/crossdreaming_notebook_samples.png).
Or the time when track and field practice split up into boys and girls, and I ironically muttered under my breath, "Why did I even join this team?—boys, I mean."
-Or when it was time to order sheets to fit on the dorm beds at the University in Santa Cruz, and I made a point of picking out the pink-with-flowers design.
+Or when it was time to order sheets to fit on the dorm beds at the University in Santa Cruz, and I deliberately picked out the pink-with-flowers design on principle.
Or how I was proud to be the kind of guy who bought Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity_ when it came out in 2007.
+Or how, at University, I tried to go by my [first-and-middle-initials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials) because I wanted a gender-neutral [byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline), and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because _that would be crazy_.
+
+(This attempted nickname-change turned out to be a terrible idea for several reasons: first, my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); second, I found it incredibly psychologically stressful for some people to know me by one name, and people I knew before to know me by another, and I didn't have the guts to nag people in the latter group to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; third, the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly didn't hold up in practice because my real first initial (not _M._; this blog is under a pen name) is a high-Scrabble-score letter that begins one high-frequency boy name (top 200 in the [1990 Census list](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/1990_census/1990_census_namefiles.html)), and no high-frequency girl names (the most popular candidates trailing my ugly boy-name in frequency by an order of magnitude). But it was the _principle!_)
+
+Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)
+
Or how one of the [little song-fragments I would write in my head](/tag/music/) went—
> _Sometimes I sigh because I'll never get rich
Or the time I felt proud when my Normal American Girl coworker at the supermarket in 'aught-nine said that she had assumed I was gay. (I'm not, but the fact that Normal American Girl thought so meant that I was successfully unmasculine.)
-And so on _et cetera ad infinitum_. This was a very persistent _thing_ for me.
+And so on _et cetera ad infinitum_. This has been a very persistent _thing_ for me.
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!
The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is _not_ typical along each dimension individually. [In 100 flips of a biased coin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the _single_ most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're _vanishingly_ unlikely to actually see it. The sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads. Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, [most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/), for the same reason. (The _same_ reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large _n_.)
-Statistical sex differences are like flipping two different collections of coins with different biases, where the coins represent various traits. Learning the outcome of any individual flip, doesn't tell you which which set the coin came from, but [if we look at the aggregation of many flips, we can get _godlike_ confidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) as to which collection we're looking at.
+Statistical sex differences are like flipping two different collections of coins with different biases, where the coins represent various traits. Learning the outcome of any individual flip, doesn't tell you which set the coin came from, but [if we look at the aggregation of many flips, we can get _godlike_ confidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) as to which collection we're looking at.
A single-variable measurement like height is like a single coin: unless the coin is _very_ biased, one flip can't tell you much about the bias. But there are lots of things about people for which it's not that they can't be measured, but that the measurements require _more than one number_—which correspondingly offer more information about the distribution generating them.
-[TODO (somewhere around-ish this section): chromosomes at the root of the causal graph: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models ]
+And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. Certainly, I agree that almost no one besides professional geneticists interact with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes _existed_ before 1905. [(Co-discovered by a woman!)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens) But the function of [intensional definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) in human natural language isn't to exhaustively [pinpoint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing) a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AI's executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why [Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. ["The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary)
+
+But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the SRY gene located on the Y chromosome, _is_ at the root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) underlying all other sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living _before_ 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been _right_. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty _well-performing_ definition—if you're looking for a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests)
+
+[TODO: finish bridge ...]
Take faces. People are [verifiably very good at recognizing sex from (hair covered, males clean-shaven) photographs of people's faces](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf) (96% accuracy, which is the equivalent of _d_ ≈ 3.5), but we don't have direct introspective access into what _specific_ features our brains are using to do it; we just look, and _somehow_ know. The differences are real, but it's not a matter of any single, simple measurement you could perform with a ruler (like the distance between someone's eyes). Rather, it's a high-dimensional _pattern_ in many measurements you could take with a ruler, no one of which is definitive. [Covering up the nose makes people slower and slightly worse at sexing faces, but people don't do better than chance at guessing sex from photos of noses alone](/papers/roberts-bruce-feature_saliency_in_judging_the_sex_and_familiarity_of_faces.pdf).
> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5-10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
-Indeed—here we are just 4¾ years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://web.archive.org/web/20200225212407/https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really, really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and how to [panic sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
+Indeed—here we are just 4¾ years later, and _I am panicking_. (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://web.archive.org/web/20200225212407/https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and how to [panic sideways in policyspace](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
At the time, this was merely _very confusing_ to hear coming from the guy who wrote "Changing Emotions". I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html))
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?!
+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?!
[TODO: make the dark-side-epistemology/Category-War case in a couple sentences without blaming anyone]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff