Title: Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
-Date: 2021-02-14 05:00
+Date: 2021-02-15 11:00
Category: commentary
-Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
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). 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.
+Well. That's a _long story_. To _start_, 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.
It all started in summer 2007 (I was nineteen years old), when I came across _Overcoming Bias_, a blog on the theme of how to achieve more accurate beliefs. (I don't remember exactly how I was referred, but I think it was likely to have been [a link from Megan McArdle](https://web.archive.org/web/20071129181942/http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009783.html), then writing as "Jane Galt" at _Asymmetrical Information_.)
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_.
-Maybe this story reads differently in 2020 from how it was to live in the 'aughts? I think that teenage boys in the current year having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—
+Maybe this story reads differently in 2021 from how it was to live in the 'aughts? I think that teenage boys in the current year having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—
(and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is _much_ easier to talk about than the erotic thing)
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. (I understood my "tranny girl" song to reflect an idle fantasy, not a legitimate life plan.)
-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". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—[roughly analogous to how](/2017/Jul/interlude-vi/) a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
-[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 psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
+[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).
I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this whole theoretical line of argument about evolutionary psychology doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around [quasi-religious _denial_](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9).
-My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but there were definitely some SJW-like patterns in my comments, inherited from my time in the feminist blogosphere.
+My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but I definitely had the SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to [minimize the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
-[TODO:
+Another one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head a few years earlier (which I mention for its being representative of my attitude at the time, rather than it being notable in itself), mentioned an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/), syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences—the usual fare about women seeking commitment and men seeking youth and beauty. My song went—
-Amy Alkon song
-
-http://www.advicegoddess.com/ag-columns-blog/newindex.html
-> I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight
-> So she can't give her bad advice
-> No love or value save for evolutionary psych
+> _I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight
+> So she can't give her bad advice
+> No love or value save for evolutionary psych_
>
-> I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight
-> Because the world's not girls and guys
-> Cave men and women fucking 'round the fire in the night
+> _I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight
+> Because the world's not girls and guys
+> Cave men and women fucking 'round the fire in the night_
-this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/), Yud on "men should think of themselves as men" / "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
+Looking back with the outlook later acquired from my robot cult, this is abhorrent. You don't _casually wish death_ on someone just because you disagree with their theory of psychology! Even if it wasn't in a spirit of personal malice (this was a song I sung to myself, not an actual threat directed to Amy Alkon's inbox), the sentiment just _isn't done_. But at the time, I _didn't notice there was anything wrong with my song_. I hadn't yet been socialized into the refined ethos of "False ideas should be argued with, but heed that we too may have ideas that are false".
-Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html
+[TODO: this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/), Yud on "men should think of themselves as men" / "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"]
-contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky: "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)
+[TODO: Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html ; contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky: "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)]
-Vassar slapping me down in June 2008 (on the same day that I crossdressed in front of Seanan and Katie!): https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267438
+[TODO Vassar slapping me down in June 2008 (on the same day that I crossdressed in front of Seanan and Katie!): https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267438]
-]
+[TODO (when I have internet privs again): this was the same day I crossdressed in front of S. and K., the first time I was xrossdressed in front of other people ever!!]
Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
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.
-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 interacts 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _are_ such a common cause—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) that provides a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
+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](https://archive.is/y5V9i), when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. Certainly, I agree that almost no one interacts 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _are_ such a common cause—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) that provides a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
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).
As a computer programmer, I have learned to fear complexity and dependencies. If you've ever wondered why it seems like [all software is buggy and terrible](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), it's because _no one knows what they're doing_. Each individual programmer and engineer understands their _piece_ of the system well enough that companies can ship products that mostly do what they claim, but there's a lot of chaos and despair where the pieces don't quite fit, and no one knows why. (Maybe _someone_ could figure it out in a reasonable amount of time, but the user who is suffering and in pain has no way of buying their attention.)
-But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of _biology_, and I think I have reason to be wary of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and corporations, but the idealized Platonic forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.
+But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of evolved biological systems, and I think I have [reason to be wary](https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf) of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and corporations, but the idealized Platonic forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.
_All_ drugs have side-effects; _all_ surgeries have the potential for complications. Through centuries of trial and error (where "error" means suffering and disfigurement and death), our civilization has accumulated a suite of hacks for which the benefits seem to exceed the costs (given circumstances you would prefer not to face in the first place).
Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibition, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which currently has 100,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
-Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
+Certainly, 82% is not 100%! (But 82% is evidence for my claim that a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are essentially guys like me.) Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing.
[TODO: one sentence summary from each of—
-Blanchard 1985 /papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf
+Blanchard 1985 /papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf
Lawrence 2005 /papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf
Smith _et al._ 2005 /papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf
Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011 /papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf
[TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598 ]
-Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me too! Want first-person accounts? Me too! And there's lots!
+Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
-[TODO: McCloskey male sex]
+Consider this passage from Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53:
-[TODO: or how did I missed this from Serano 2007]
+> He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: _About five thousand episodes_. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.
-> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
+Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ (I know I [keep](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) [referencing](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/) this book, but it's _so representative_ of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) of the all [the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007](/2016/Sep/apophenia/))—
-[TODO: I also think about it nonsexually—my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—but "became obvious" is wrong. Contrast to androphilic type is a clue that this is not what brain-intersex looks like. Analogy to broken ankles—there's going to be a fact of the matter. Trust people are telling the truth about their own experiences, but can get the causality wrong. I used to cut myself.]
+> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
-[TODO: more causal confusion in people I talk to. One said AGP transition could be possible but very rare, and the same goddamned person is on the record as being into TF porn at 19 when their dysphoria kicked in; or someone dissed Blanchard, but endorses Anne Vitale, which makes the same observations and arrives at the same taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language
+"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is _not an experience_; it's a _hypothesis_ about psychology, about the _causes_ of the experience.
-http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm]
+Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard-and-friends and arrives at essentially the _same_ two-type taxonomy of MtF, but dressed up in socially-desirable language—
> As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
Got that? They _often combine excessive masturbation_ with an _increase in secret cross-dressing activity_ to _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
-[TODO caveated understanding that the same _descriptive_ taxonomy could have a different causal/etiological story behind it /2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/ ]
-
After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type feminine–androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
+An important caveat must be made: [different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same _descriptive_ taxonomy.](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a serious and rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown _enough_ work here, that the reader can perhaps empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?
+
+Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a _design_. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor (who's studied the literature and seen many more cases) is going to ask followup questions about my experiences to pin down whether it's stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact _that_ my ankle hurts (that's a privileged first-person experience), but I can easily be wrong about my _theory about_ why my ankle hurts.
+
+Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question is, do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly _different_ psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, and (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?
+
+The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves without any need for modification—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
+
How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge and methodology our civilization has managed to accumulate.
Reality has a single level (physics), but [our models of reality have multiple levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRa5cWWBsZqdFvmqu/reductive-reference). To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As [it is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism) [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression): the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.)
(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)
-If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to identify as trans, which could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
+If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to disidentify with maleness. Like in another one of my teenage song-fragments—
-To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as sex dysphoria is common (or has _become_ more common), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); it might not be as easy for a clinician to distinguish autogynephilia from "cognitive" gender problems in the grab-bag of all other males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
+> _Look in the mirror
+> What's a_ white guy _doing there?
+> I'm just a spirit
+> I'm just a spirit
+> Floating in air, floating in air, floating in air!_
+
+This culturally-transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
+
+To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as cross-gender identification is common (or has _become_ more common in the recent cultural environment), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); in contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from _other_ sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_.
The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2021 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity or hurt feelings as costs), also [can't get heliocentrism right in 1633](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair) [_for the same reason_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaCwW8nPQeJknbCgf/free-speech-and-triskaidekaphobic-calculators-a-reply-to)—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2041.
-[TODO: or at least, even if there are things we can't talk about, we should at least want to avoid dark side epistemology. Briefly tell the story of the Category War?—but try to keep it brief and not-personal; the focus should be on dark side epistemology, rather than re-picking my fight with S.A. or E.Y. (maybe don't name them, but describe the abstract dynamics and link). "Everyone else shot first." Wasn't what I was trying to talk about, but I took the bait. For me, this isn't just a "political" topic—I actually need the right answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off]
+Or at least—even if there are things we can't talk about in public for consequentialist reasons and there's nothing to be done about it, you would hope that the censorship wouldn't distort our beliefs about the things we _can_ talk about (like, say, the role of Bayesian reasoning in the philosophy of language). Yudkowsky had written about the [dark side epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology) and [contagious lies](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies): trying to protect a false belief doesn't just mean being wrong about that one thing, it also gives you, on the object level, an incentive to be wrong about anything that would _imply_ the falsity of the protected belief—and, on the meta level, an incentive to be wrong _about epistemology itself_, about how "implying" and "falsity" work.
+
+So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 blog post by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
+
+So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world.
+
+But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win. [We had a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) back in 'aught-eight, in which Yudkowsky pounded home this _exact_ point _over and over and over again_, that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
+
+> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
+
+> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+
+> ["When you take into account the way the human mind actually, pragmatically works, the notion 'I can define a word any way I like' soon becomes 'I can believe anything I want about a fixed set of objects' or 'I can move any object I want in or out of a fixed membership test'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)
+
+> ["There's an idea, which you may have noticed I hate, that 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dfY65JciebF3CAo/empty-labels)
+
+> ["And of course you cannot solve a scientific challenge by appealing to dictionaries, nor master a complex skill of inquiry by saying 'I can define a word any way I like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression)
+
+> ["Categories are not static things in the context of a human brain; as soon as you actually think of them, they exert force on your mind. One more reason not to believe you can define a word any way you like."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences)
+
+> ["And people are lazy. They'd rather argue 'by definition', especially since they think 'you can define a word any way you like'."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yuKaWPRTxZoov4z8K/sneaking-in-connotations)
+
+> ["And this suggests another—yes, yet another—reason to be suspicious of the claim that 'you can define a word any way you like'. When you consider the superexponential size of Conceptspace, it becomes clear that singling out one particular concept for consideration is an act of no small audacity—not just for us, but for any mind of bounded computing power."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words)
+
+> ["I say all this, because the idea that 'You can X any way you like' is a huge obstacle to learning how to X wisely. 'It's a free country; I have a right to my own opinion' obstructs the art of finding truth. 'I can define a word any way I like' obstructs the art of carving reality at its joints. And even the sensible-sounding 'The labels we attach to words are arbitrary' obstructs awareness of compactness."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)
+
+> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
+
+So, because I trusted people in my robot cult to be dealing in good faith rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail.
+
+At first I did this in the object-level context of gender on this blog, in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/).
+
+Later, after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) [(archived)](https://archive.is/ChqYX), I _flipped the fuck out_, and ended up doing more [stictly abstract philosophy-of-language work](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
+
+An important thing to appreciate is that the philosophical point I was trying to make has _absolutely nothing to do with gender_. In 2008, Yudkowsky had explained that _for all_ nouns N, you can't define _N_ any way you want, because _useful_ definitions need to "carve reality at the joints."
+
+It [_follows logically_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization) that, in particular, if _N_ := "woman", you can't define the word _woman_ any way you want. Maybe trans women _are_ women! But if so—that is, if you want people to agree to that word usage—you need to be able to _argue_ for why that usage makes sense on the empirical merits; you can't just _define_ it to be true. And this is a _general_ principle of how language works, not something I made up on the spot in order to attack trans people.
+
+In 2008, this very general philosophy of language lesson was _not politically controversial_. If, in 2018–present, it _is_ politically controversial (specifically because of the fear that someone will try to apply it with _N_ := "woman"), that's a _problem_ for our whole systematically-correct-reasoning project! What counts as good philosophy—or even good philosophy _pedagogy_—shouldn't depend on the current year!
+
+There is a _sense in which_ one might say that you "can" define a word any way you want. That is: words don't have intrinsic ontologically-basic meanings. We can imagine an alternative world where people spoke a language that was _like_ the English of our world, except that they use the word "tree" to refer to members of the empirical entity-cluster that we call "dogs" and _vice versa_, and it's hard to think of a meaningful sense in which one convention is "right" and the other is "wrong".
+
+But there's also an important _sense in which_ we want to say that you "can't" define a word any way you want. That is: some ways of using words work better for transmitting information from one place to another. It would be harder to explain your observations from a trip to the local park in a language that used the word "tree" to refer to members of _either_ of the empirical entity-clusters that the English of our world calls "dogs" and "trees", because grouping together things that aren't relevantly similar like that makes it harder to describe differences between the wagging-animal-trees and the leafy-plant-trees.
+
+If you want to teach people about the philosophy of language, you should want to convey _both_ of these lessons, against naïve essentialism, _and_ against naïve anti-essentialism. If the people who are widely respected and trusted [(almost worshipped)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts) as the leaders of the systematically-correct-reasoning community, [_selectively_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AdYdLP2sRqPMoe8fb/knowing-about-biases-can-hurt-people) teach _only_ the words-don't-have-intrinsic-ontologically-basic-meanings part when the topic at hand happens to be trans issues (because talking about the carve-reality-at-the-joints part would be [politically suicidal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DoPo4PDjgSySquHX8/heads-i-win-tails-never-heard-of-her-or-selective-reporting)), then people who trust the leaders are likely to get the wrong idea about how the philosophy of language works—even if [the selective argumentation isn't _conscious_ or deliberative](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) and [even if every individual sentence they say permits a true interpretation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MN4NRkMw7ggt9587K/firming-up-not-lying-around-its-edge-cases-is-less-broadly).
+
+(As it is written of the fourth virtue of evenness, ["If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider."](https://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues))
+
+[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
+Scott has written exhaustively about the dangers of strategic equivocation ("Worst Argument", "Brick in the Motte"); insofar as I can get a _coherent_ posiiton out of the conjunction of "... for the Categories" and Scott's other work, it's that he must think strategic equivocation is OK if it's for being nice to people
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/16/against-lie-inflation/
+]
+
+_Was_ it a "political" act for me to write about the cognitive function of categorization on the robot-cult blog with non-gender examples, when gender was secretly ("secretly") my _motivating_ example? In some sense, I guess? But if so, the thing you have to realize is—
+
+_Everyone else shot first_. The timestamps back me up here: my ["... To Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (February 2018) was a _response to_ Alexander's ["... Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) (November 2014). My philosophy-of-language work on the robot-cult blog (April 2019–January 2021) was (stealthily) _in response to_ Yudkowsky's November 2018 Twitter thread. When I started trying to talk about autogynephilia with all my robot cult friends in 2016, I _did not expect_ to get dragged into a multi-year philosophy-of-language crusade! That was just _one branch_ of the argument-tree that, once begun, I thought should be easy to _definitively settle in public_ (within our robot cult, whatever the _general_ public thinks).
+
+I guess by now the branch is as close to settled as it's going to get? Alexander ended up [adding an edit note to the end of "... Not Man to the Categories" in December 2019](https://archive.is/1a4zV#selection-805.0-817.1), and Yudkowsky would [go on to clarify his position on the philosophy of language in September 2020](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10158853851009228). So, that's nice. But I will confess to being quite disappointed that the public argument-tree evaluation didn't get much further, much faster? The thing you have understand about this whole debate is—
+
+_I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. As I've said, I _currently_ believe that cutting my dick off would be a _bad_ idea. But that's cost–benefit judgement call based on many _contingent, empirical_ beliefs about the world. I'm obviously in the general _reference class_ of males who are getting their dicks cut off these days, and a lot of them seem to be pretty happy about it! I would be much more likely to go through with transitioning if I believed different things about the world—if I thought my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing were a brain-intersex condition, or if I still believed in my teenage psychological-sex-differences denialism (such that there would be _axiomatically_ no worries about fitting with "other" women after transitioning), or if I were more optimistic about the degree to which HRT and surgeries approximate an actual sex change.
+
+In that November 2018 Twitter thread, [Yudkowsky wrote](https://archive.is/y5V9i):
+
+> _Even if_ somebody went around saying, "I demand you call me 'she' and furthermore I claim to have two X chromosomes!", which none of my trans colleagues have ever said to me by the way, it still isn't a question-of-empirical-fact whether she should be called "she". It's an act."
+
+This seems to suggest that gender pronouns in the English language as currently spoken don't have effective truth conditions. I think this is false _as a matter of cognitive science_. If someone told you, "Hey, you should come meet my friend at the mall, she is really cool and I think you'll like her," and then the friend turned out to look like me (as I am now), _you would be surprised_. (Even if people in Berkeley would socially punish you for _admitting_ that you were surprised.) The "she ... her" pronouns would prompt your brain to _predict_ that the friend would appear to be female, and that prediction would be _falsified_ by someone who looked like me (as I am now). Pretending that the social-norms dispute is about chromosomes was a _bullshit_ [weakmanning](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) move on the part of Yudkowsky, [who had once written that](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence) "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates[;] [a]rguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates." Thanks to the skills I learned from Yudkowsky's _earlier_ writing, I wasn't dumb enough to fall for it, but we can imagine someone otherwise similar to me who was, who might have thereby been misled into making worse life decisions.
+
+If this "rationality" stuff is useful for _anything at all_, you would _expect_ it to be useful for _practical life decisions_ like _whether or not I should cut my dick off_.
+
+In order to get the _right answer_ to that policy question (whatever the right answer turns out to be), you need to _at minimum_ be able to get the _right answer_ on related fact-questions like "Is late-onset gender dysphoria in males an intersex condition?" (answer: no) and related philosophy-questions like "Can we arbitrarily redefine words such as 'woman' without adverse effects on our cognition?" (answer: no).
+
+At the cost of _wasting three years of my life_, we _did_ manage to get the philosophy question right! Again, that's nice. But compared to the Sequences-era dreams of changing the world with a Second Scientific Revolution, it's too little, too slow, too late. If our public discourse is going to be this aggressively optimized for _tricking me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off determining whether or not I should cut my dick off), that kills the whole project for me. I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _do_ [color one's thinking to some extent](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/)—but when it comes to that, I have no reason to expect the overall design of English grammar and vocabulary "got it right" where Spanish or Russian "got it wrong."
-What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about [minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), even if it hurts someone's feelings.
+What matters isn't the specific object-level choice of pronoun or bathroom conventions; what matters is having a culture where people _viscerally care_ about minimizing the expected squared error of our probabilistic predictions, even at the expense of people's feelings—[_especially_ at the expense of people's feelings](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/bayesomasochism/).
I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins. But [beyond technical mastery of one's narrow specialty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-the-laboratory), there's going to be some competence threshold in ["seeing the correspondence of mathematical structures to What Happens in the Real World"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sizjfDgCgAsuLJQmm/reply-to-holden-on-tool-ai) that _forces_ correct conclusions. I actually _don't_ think you can be a believing Christian and invent [the concern about consequentialists embedded in the Solomonoff prior](https://ordinaryideas.wordpress.com/2016/11/30/what-does-the-universal-prior-actually-look-like/).
-But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "God of the gaps" that makes no particular predictions, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that makes no particular predictions.
+But the _same_ general parsimony-skill that rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "God of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never the threat of being empirically falsified, _also_ rejects belief in an epiphenomenal "gender of the gaps" that is verbally asserted to exist but will never face the threat of being empirically falsified.
In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
-In a world where we don't have magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods ...
+In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females, males, masculinized females (a.k.a. trans men), and feminized males (a.k.a. trans women).
[TODO: explain that "I don't do policy."]
The thing I'm objecting to is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
-[TODO: Jessica and Sam should exist, but this culture is nuts
+[TODO: my friends should exist, but this culture is nuts
https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
> I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???
It was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice
-
+
Ziz's complaint that I'm siding with the oppressors in conceptual warfare
the political incentives propagate recursively, a phase transition: in a culture it's normal for AGP males to transition, any sub-culture where they don't is subject to attack as transphobic
I want to stay aligned with _actual women_, many of whom have an interest in excluding me and Ziz
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff