4 November 2018 email to Marcus—
> Concrete anecdote about how my incredibly-filtered Berkeley social circle is nuts: at a small gathering this weekend I counted seven MtTs. (I think seven; I guess it's possible that physically-very-passable Cassandra is actually female, but given the context and her personality, I doubt it.) Plus me (a man wearing a dress and makeup), and three ordinary men, one ordinary woman, and my FtM friend. Looking up the MtTs' birthdays on Facebook was instructive in determining exactly how many years I was born too early. (Lots of 1992-3 births, so about five years.)
+Scathing rhetoric to Scott—
+> (I've been told that I'm not using the word "gaslighting" correctly. Somehow no one seems to think I have the right to define that category boundary however I want.)
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+> If our vaunted rationality techniques result in me having to spend dozens of hours patiently explaining why I don't think that I'm a woman and that the person in this photograph isn't a woman, either (where "isn't a woman" is a convenient rhetorical shorthand for a much longer statement about naïve Bayes models and high-dimensional configuration spaces and defensible Schelling points for social norms), then our techniques are worse than useless.
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+> But at the same time, if Galileo ever muttered "And yet it moves", there's a very similar long and important discussion to be had about the consequences of using the word "moves" in Galileo's preferred sense or some other sense that happens to result in the theory needing more epicycles. It may not have been obvious in 2014, but in retrospect, maybe it was a bad idea to build a memetic superweapon that says the number of epicycles doesn't matter.
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+> It's gotten the point where Nature (!!!) has an editorial proclaiming ["US proposal for defining gender has no basis in science"](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07238-8). And if otherkin started becoming sufficiently popular, I have no doubt that they could write an equally sober editorial denouncing species classification as having no basis in science. (Have you heard of ring species? Checkmate, cisspeciesists!)
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+> I don't care about the social right to call Sam "he", because I wasn't going to do that anyway. What I do care about is the right to say "That's not what I meant by 'woman' in this context, and you fucking know it" when I think that my interloctuor does, in fact, fucking know it.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff