-
The thing about our crowd is that we have a lamentably low proportion of women (13.3% cis women in the last community survey) and—I don't know when this happened; it certainly didn't feel like this back in 'aught-nine—an enormous number of trans women relative to population base rates (2.7%, for a cis-to-trans ratio of 4.9!!), the vast majority of whom I expect to be AGP
-
https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/142995164286/i-was-at-a-slate-star-codex-meetup. "We are solving the gender ratio issue one transition at a time"
+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 post by Scott Alexander
+, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
-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 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)
+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
-> ["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)
+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.
-> ["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)
+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.
-> ["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)
[TODO: contrast "... Not Man for the Categories" to "Against Lie Inflation";
When the topic at hand is how to define "lying", Alexander
I'm worried about the failure mode where bright young minds [lured in](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/) by the beautiful propaganda about _systematically correct reasoning_, are instead recruited into what is, effectively, the Eliezer-Yudkowsky-and-Scott-Alexander fan club.
-> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
+> I'm not trying to get Eliezer or "the community" to take a public stance on gender politics; I'm trying to get us to take a stance in favor of the kind of epistemology that we were doing in 2008. It turns out that epistemology has implications for gender politics which are unsafe, but that's more inferential steps, and ... I guess I just don't expect the sort of people who would punish good epistemology to follow the inferential steps? Maybe I'm living in the should-universe a bit here, but I don't think it "should" be hard for Eliezer to publicly say, "Yep, categories aren't arbitrary because you need them to carve reality at the joints in order to make probabilistic inferences, just like I said in 2008; this is obvious."
Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/
https://jasoncrawford.org/guide-to-scott-alexander-and-slate-star-codex
https://nothingismere.com/2015/09/12/library-of-scott-alexandria/
https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
-"Index of Yvain's excellent articles"
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xaLHeoRPdb9oQgDEy/index-of-yvain-s-excellent-articles
Nate on dolphins (June 2021)—a dogwhistle??
https://twitter.com/So8res/status/1401670792409014273
----------
-https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14
-> Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.
+In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan) [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
+
+> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.
+
+When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
+
+Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
+
+The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with having cross-sex fantasies, and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
+
+The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves, and that's _not possible_ in a culture that tries to ban, as heresy, the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.
+
+A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like a male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"
+
+It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult should understand—
+
+_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt.
+
+I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _[emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see_. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
+
+In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-binding our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
+
+But I would have expected people with the barest inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution?
+
+And if that's too much to accept of the general public—
+
+And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own—
+
+Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
+
+[in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like Dawkins (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) and Jerry Coyne (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/) can see it]
+
+----------
+
+In part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Mencius Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
+
+Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners. It's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
+
+[Moldbug argues that this is how America treats non-Asian minorities; and that it actually has bad effects on the people themselves—]
-There's a glowfic thread where Thellim is _horrified_ at how shallow and superficial Jane Austen characters are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be: "Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves."
+> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
-This horror is basically how I feel about trans culture. It actively discourages self-modeling! (People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Politically-unfavorable critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._)
+[I can see the argument abstractly, but I couldn't put my weight down on it being bad for the people themselves, until I see it happening to my people ...]
-https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=20
+It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, but I clearly didn't have license to _talk_ about any reasons to be skeptical ...
-_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._
+[Scott Alexander wrote about how there are different dimensions of power—
+http://web.archive.org/web/20130424233301/http://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html]
-https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=21
+—until, suddenly, in 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
+
+----------
+
+[TODO: David Xu's postrat]
+And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
-----------
> I suspect Scott is calling the wrong side monastic, though - we basically believe it can be done by lay people, he doesn't. I'll be pleasantly surprised if he gets the sides right, though.
-Dawkins and Dennett have joined the intellectual gender-ID skeptics; shame that Yudkowsky can't reach that level
-
• at least Sabbatai Zevi had an excuse: his choices were to convert to Islam or be impaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi#Conversion_to_Islam
Really, self-respecting trans people who care about logical consistency should abhor Scott and Eliezer's opinions—you should want people to use the right pronouns _because_ of your gender soul or _because_ your transition actually worked, not because categories are flexible and pronouns shouldn't imply gender
I think it's a problem for our collective epistemology that Scott has the power to sneeze his mistakes onto everyone else—that our 2021 beliefs about dolphins (literally, dolphins in particular!) is causally downstream of Scott's political incentives in 2014, even if Scott wasn't consciously lying and Nate wasn't thinking about gender politics. I think this is the problem that Eliezer identified as dark side epistemology: people invent fake epistemology lessons to force a conclusion that they can't get on the merits, and the fake lessons can spread, even if the meme-recipients aren't trying to force anything themselves. I would have expected people with cultural power to be interested in correcting the problem once it was pointed out.
-And the thing where David Xu interprets criticism of Eliezer as me going "full post-rat"?! https://twitter.com/davidxu90/status/1435106339550740482
-
https://twitter.com/esyudkowsky/status/1374161729073020937
-
> Also: Having some things you say "no comment" to, is not at *all* the same phenomenon as being an organization that issues Pronouncements. There are a *lot* of good reasons to have "no comments" about things. Anybody who tells you otherwise has no life experience, or is lying.
"Speak out in order to make it clear how not alt-right you are; nothing wrong with that because I'm not lying" is being inconsistent about whether signaling and mood-affiliation matters—it's trying to socially profit by signaling pro-Stalin-ness, while simultaneously denying that anyone could object (because you didn't lie—pivoting to a worldview where only literal meanings matter and signals aren't real). Can I sketch this out mathematically?
I _never_ expected to end up arguing about something so _trivial_ as the minutiae of pronoun conventions (which no one would care about if historical contingencies of the evolution of the English language hadn't made them a Schelling point and typographical attack surface for things people do care about). The conversation only ended up here after a series of derailings. At the start, I was _trying_ to say something substantive about the psychology of straight men who wish they were women.
-You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological denial of psychological sex differences and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)].
+You see, back in the 'aughts when Yudkowsky was writing his Sequences, he occasionally said some things about sex differences that I often found offensive at the time, but which ended up being hugely influential on me, especially in the context of my ideological denial of psychological sex differences and my secret lifelong-since-puberty erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman. I wrote about this at length in a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to my Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/)]
+.
In particular, in ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (and its precursor in a [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW)), Yudkowsky explains that "changing sex" is vastly easier said than done—
contrast to masochism being an infohazard in dath ilan: in real life, when your sexuality is considered an infrohazard, you don't take it lying down
-postyud
-
Scott has the power to set narratives, as evidenced by his attack on Michael hijacking Jessica's thread
maybe he should have some sympathy for Stephen J. Gould's intellectual crimes
> their verbal theories contradict their own datapoints
https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159408250519228?comment_id=10159411435619228&reply_comment_id=10159411567794228
+
+dath ilan has Actual Evolutionary Psychology
+> They end up wanting 42 major things and 314 minor things (on the current count of what's known and thought to be distinct in the way of adaptation)
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801140#reply-1801140
+
+> When somebody stops coordinating with you, stop coordinating with them. It's not 'punishment' to Defect against somebody who's Defecting against you, in a cooperation-defection dilemma; you're just withdrawing the Cooperation you were trying to coordinate with them
+https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1801374#reply-1801374
+
+I joined the "Eliezerfic" server in spite of my enmity, and JoshTriplett is in there (contrary to my gut instinct that Rust peeps hate my rationalist peeps)
+
+Tweet about "unvirtuous to just believe me"—well, YES
+
+The cowardice is remarkable, coming from someone who otherwise
+
+jbeshir
+> I have a writer/author friend, they had a problem a couple or so times with people who get really really into the work and community, then in their mind got disappointed in some way- and that investments converts at a surprisingly high exchange rate directly into investment in making your life worse. It... happens.
+—this makes a callout post or Twitter thread seem less appealing
+
+
+[previously, I had felt guilty about being less successfully feminst than Robby https://nothingismere.com/2013/12/26/union-names-objections-and-replies/]
+[internet pharmacy]
+
+
+> whereas I could imagine reading almost the same post on sneerclub and turning into a prickle about it
+response—
+> me when other trans girls call themselves and me AGP vs when genuine Blanchardians do
+
+In a discussion on criticism of EA by outsiders, someone spontaneously (not prompted by me) mentioned the difference between when fellow trans women called themselves AGP, vs. actual Blanchardians. This is a conspiracy!! (The ingroup is allowed to notice things, but when other people notice, deny everything. Compare Michael Anton on "celebration parallax."]
+
+https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/understanding-relationship-conflicts-clashing-trauma
+
+postyud; Yudkowskyism without Yudkowsky
+
+if you know Reality is red, blue, or green, and I know Reality is red but am trying to maximize the probability you assign to green, I can truthfully say "it's not blue"
+
+Gell-Mann amnesia
+
+EY's commenting guidelines
+
+> Sneerclub gives him an excuse to just not engage with legitimate criticism
+https://twitter.com/satisfiesvalues/status/1524475059695505409
+
+flu virus that cures Borderer culture
+https://twitter.com/Kenku_Allaryi/status/1524646257976877057
+
+Zvi claims the condescension is important information, which is why it's such a betrayal when he uses the condesension to score points
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ax695frGJEzGxFBK4/biology-inspired-agi-timelines-the-trick-that-never-works?commentId=HB3BL3Sa6MxSszqdq
+
+Anna thinks that committees can't do anything worthwhile; for endeavors requiring a lot of coordination, it's useful for leaders to have slack to make decisions without having to justify themselves to a mob. Anna endorses Straussianism: writing for the few is different from writing for the many, and that some of Ben's stuff may have veered too far towards loading negative affect on EA leaders; I and my model of Michael have reservations about the extent to which \"writing for the few\" could also be described as \"colluding to deceive the rest of the world\
+
+[TODO: at first I made some pushback comments on other people's posts; e.g., Robby's thread on 7 Feburary
+Then it blossomed into an extended tantrum on my own wall—
+31 posts total between—"some of you may have noticed" Sat 11 Feb, and promising to quite Facebook for a week 0844 15 Feburary
+
+my terrible date with Anna T. was actually on 12 February—that explains why I remember being so distracted!
+
+Tue Feb 14 2017 10:52:04
+So my theory is Anna would not be reacting as vehemently had you not recently asked her out
+And that she is trying to play a signaling game to salvage her status in the community by distancing herself from you"
+"See? See everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake too!
+
+
+an irony: in my psychosis, I was scared that the world was far less legible than I had imagined, but that _wasn't_ why my ordeal's and Devi's were so traumatic _at all_: the psych ward is _very much_ governed by legible rules, rules that I had no control over
+
+
+I had some self-awareness that I was going off the rails—
+> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state. https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813104220199
+
+sent Anna T. Oops / Ooops / Cooperate 6x messages on Thu 16 Feb at around 1530 ...
+
+
+Ziz: Vassar was talking about you recently approvingly, having read your facebook wall. Something about a war between being able to think and gaslighting.
+Like he named you as one of three fronts the war is playing out on. Jack also seemed to agree. \"Sarah vs Ben, Rob vs Ben Todd, Zack Davis vs the world Thu Feb 16 2017 16:06:42 GMT-0800
+
+I remember being afraid that the thing that happened to Eliezer and then Scott was going to happen to me, and that it would be bad; I told Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet" Thu Feb 16 2017 15:51:32
+
+to Ben: "I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:23:53
+
+to Ben: "I thought I got a message from Michael Vassar saying that the main coalitions were you, and Sarah Constantine, and Zack Davis vs. the world" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:30:55 GMT-0800
+
+scared that Orion was going to kill me
+
+to Ben: You can use police cars as Ubers???? Fri Feb 17 2017 15:19:59 GMT-0800
+
+/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
+/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
+
+]
+
+You gave me hot chocolate last night, right? I was worried that you were subconsciously poisoning me; not on purpose, but because there are just a lot of contaminants in cities; things that taste sweet to children but are actually poisonous; but, Anna said that most events are normal; I don't remember that note"
+
+meeting Katie—
+
+Sun Jan 15 2017 08:35:40
+Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\"",
+
+He was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff"
+But in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy
+Not in the way of someone feminine
+The only thing I knew about it at the point we got married was that he thought it was fun to go in drag sometimes
+Like Halloween
+
+And he thought feminization kink was fun
+Like me making him dress up? But he said it was about humiliation
+We didn't even do it more than a handful of times, it wasn't really my thing
+Nothing in my experience ever caused me to think he was trans
+
+"He talked about being a child always feeling out of place
+"But out of place seemed like because he was shy and anxious
+He said he was convinced his anxiety and social problems was *because* he was trans
+
+Spencer seemed much less happy to me after admitting to want transition, often crying about how ugly his body was
+
+because it basically amounts to, \"You rebuilt your entire life around your perverted narcissistic fantasy and didn't even notice\
+like, there's no nice way to say that
+
+My taxon, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.\
+
+all those transwomen are going to be so embarrassed when the FAI gives us telepathy after the Singularity
+and it turns out that what actual women feel as _absolutely nothing to do_ with what AGP fantasy feels like
+
+Holy shit, this is *exactly* what happened with me
+Katie's comment on https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/
+
+
+Tue Feb 14 2017 11:26:20 (this conversation was actually during the tantrum)—
+K: I really *was* getting to the point that I hated transwomen
+Z: I hate them, too!
+Z: Fuck those guys!
+K: I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was *getting* to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
+K: But you're actually changing that for me
+K: You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
+K: To people who are struggling and have things that are hard
+K: It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
+Z: the \"suffering\" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
+K: You've made me hate transwomen *less* now
+K: Because I have a model
+K: I understand the problem
+[...]
+K: I understand why it's hard
+K: I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
+K: This is a better thing for me
+I did not *want* to be a hateful person",
+I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public
+I think now I can do it more honestly
+They might not want *me* as a friend
+But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted
+And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
+I'm very grateful for that
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZEgQGAjQm5rTAnGuM/beware-boasting-about-non-existent-forecasting-track-records
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/criticisms-of-the-rationalist-movement
+
+> possible that 2022 is the year where we start Final Descent and by 2024 it's over
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7MCqRnZzvszsxgtJi/christiano-cotra-and-yudkowsky-on-ai-progress?commentId=iKEuFQg7HZatoebps
+
+> and yeah, when Joanna came out on Facebook Zack messaged her to have a 3-hour debate about it
+> I think no matter how pure his pursuit of knowledge this is actually bad behavior and he should not
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff