-Title: Social Strategy Notes, February 2019
+Title: Social Strategy Notes, March 2019
Date: 2020-01-01
Category: commentary
Tags: personal, software industry
Status: draft
-> _There's a heart that must be free
-> To fly
-> That burns with the need to know
-> The reason why
-> Why must we all conceal
-> What we think, how we feel?
-> Must there be a secret me I'm forced to hide?_
->
-> —"Reflection", _Mulan_ (as performed by Christina Aguilera)
+_(Attention conservation notice: petulant Diarly-like navel-gazing is boring. [Please subscribe](/feeds/all.atom.xml) for actual content later, I double-dog promise!)_
+
+So much for the rationalists (previous posts)
+
+
+At least, that was the vision _I_ internalized in the late 'aughts. Others who were present may remember things slightly differently.
+
+And so, as I previously blogged, it was _kind of a shock_ in 2016 when I moved to "Portland" (which is actually Berkeley), noticed that
-_(Attention conservation notice: petulant navel-gazing is boring. [Please subscribe](/feeds/all.atom.xml) for actual content later, I double-dog promise!)_
February has been a pretty exciting month for me in terms of advancing in my chosen profession!
karaoke: "Reflection" as trans anthem, I said "It permits many interpretations"
+telling the woman in our karaoke group that she should sing the female part, but I wouldn't have if there had been a trans woman present
+
ReductRS tweet, I probably looked annoyed rather than mirthful
it's not actually engaging with the
bundling and marketing channels, negotiation for space; I can keep quiet in a particular venue, but "not in X space" becomes "shut up and die" if X encompasses all spaces
+psychological hazards of embracing the "evil" label
+
+people just like me who read different books in a different order
+
+"Everyone is entitled to her religion/belief" is a peace treaty
+
+tempted to escalate to misgendering just as a protest against mind control (even though I wouldn't be inclined to fight about pronouns if I could get people to agree about the theory), but that's not a winning move
+
+How strong is the hypothesized "if you ever gerrymander a category, then parsimony is ever after your enemy" effect?
+
+—the hypothesis that it's a big effect, is just a hypothesis; maybe compartmentalization is safe. If I think I'm doing rationality better than everyone else, then that should _show up_ in me making progress on other subjects!
+
+"categories are arbitrary" is _generalized anti-epistemology_ that wouldn't have even _occured_ to anyone if they weren't trying to protect a broken belief
+
+clickthrough rates are bad, which is a point against the bundling strategy of writing good non-gender-war content under the same pseudonym
+
+lack of a positive vision
+
+so tempting to endlessly relitigate every minor point of conversation, when I should just let it go
+
+the "rationalist" banner is a source of huge cognitive dissonance if the majority gets it wrong
+
+cis women also get surgery / "seems fake" / 13th century word meanings
+
+I can't be friends with people who are going to gaslight me this hard
+
+important to notice that the ideological repression narrative is one of microaggressions/exclusion: should be a source of empathy!
+
+reach for condescending rhetoric: "pretending to be stupid" is emotionally satisfying rhetoric that does point to a real problem, but it's not a precise formulation, and the meta-level "you're irrational" dicussion is already so fraught that it needs all the precision it can get (ridicule might help as a violent appeal to shared values, but you need a coalition for that)
+
+the relevance of AGP is to provide a non-intersex mechanism for why males might want to be female; it's not "autoerotic people can't be female", to which claim "cis women are AGP too" would be a counterexample
+
+my obsessive personality (being angry about school felt _just_ like this)
+
+B.'s advice about the unwarranted assumption of good faith
+
+summing over three conversations, don't want to get into details because don't want to relitigate object-level points addressed in prev. (and future) posts, and because I don't want to leak too much info about non-public conversations
+
+part of the reason I've been slow to finish my draft to Ozy is the sense that it doesn't really matter
+
+I didn't explain the Schelling point thing
+
+at first I was upset about two-types in 2016/17, but that may have been premature; but now a recent flurry of activity about the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-cognition thing
+
+"Wilhelm" told me to give up, but I have a _massive_ homefield advantage that doesn't port; that's an incentive to stand my ground and fight a culture war, unpleasant as that is
+
+trans women who I love and admire and don't want to hurt—but who are a _different thing_ from actual women—_sufficiently_ different in a way that deserves either a separate noun, _or_ at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness ("women"/cis-women as the central thing, and "trans" as a wierd version); the "women, cis or trans; neither kind more central than the other" is not going to fly. Which isn't to say that "cis" is a bad word to have (I don't mind having words for "straight" or "heterosexual") (this could be its own post)
+
+"We're not actually doing the bad reasoning you're accusing us of" dodge is not credible; we had a whole goddamned sequence on this
+
+https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/
+
+pulling my punches somewhat "Why can't we define 'woman' that way?" I was trying to be conciliatory with, "You can, but sometimes I want to use the word in other ways", but maybe that just got read as a sign of weakness; a more aggressive stance would have been "Because [37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong], that's fucking why"
+
+https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/argue-politics-with-your-best-friends/
+
+"Beatrice"'s disavowal
+
+embarrassing myself
+
+rationalists are _really good_ at free speech norms
+
+progressive virtue signaling—but when I say it, it's not just a sneer; it's a
+
+https://twitter.com/zackmdavis/status/1084628483748184064
+
+test case: http://web.archive.org/web/20200111125910/https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/12/clarification-to-sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/
+
+https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php
+—
+
+stepping over the line in babyserver and #arabeth
+
+most of the ill will is on my side
+
+From the standpoint of a cultural minority, it feels like the dominant culture is constantly microaggressing against your interests, and sometimes you want to push back in self-defense, with the justification that they started it. But from the dominant culture's perspective, it was just being itself, and the "pushback" is the aggression, and the minority started it.
+
+Tail didn't even want to Tweet me?!?
+
+the oragnaizer of the Quillette meetup wanted to talk about black dysfunction, and I felt the discomfort of "Why are you interested in this topic?"
+
+the pain of being values-aligned but not ideology-aligned
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff