+Actually—maybe I _do_ want to keep this narrowly scoped to the Category War, where I have a very strong case, rather than telling my whole gender/rationalism story!
+
OUTLINE
* I haven't been doing so well, and I need to tell the story for my own sanity
* I spent my entire adult life in "rationality", and I actually believed
* In 2016, it was a huge shock to realize that I could be trans, too (I thought AGP was a different thing), and making this less confusing for other people seemed in line with the rationality mission
-* slowly waking up from sex-differences denialim through LessWrong
+* slowly waking up from sex-differences denialim through LessWrong: "Changing Emotions", "Failed Utopia #4-2"
* It was pretty traumatizing when it turned out not to be!
* But I notice people kept brining up this "Categories are arbitrary, therefore it's not wrong to insist that TWAW", and that's _definitely_ wrong; that, I knew I could win
* But then Eliezer did it, too, and I _flipped the fuck out_, and set out on a mission to try to get this shit settled in public
* Theory of jurisprudence, standing, rudeness; Outside View of bad-faith nitpickers
* When email didn't work (details redacted), I thought, "Oh, it's probably because of the politics", so I wrote up the completely general version with examples about dolphins and job titles and Mullerian mimickry in snakes
* And this is _still_ being perceived as too political, even though everyone else shot first?!?!
-* And I can't object without looking
+* And I can't object without looking like a status grab
* What I think is going on. People want to say on the good size of the Blue Egregore, and that means they can't even defend the _basics_ if there's _any_ political context, or even the context of a _person_ with political cooties
* I don't know what the optimal play is ("pretend that political constraints don't exist" might not actually work in the real world), but this is pretty bad for our collective sanity, and my mental health, and I wish we could at least try to deal with it on the meta level
* I'm politically constrained, too: I don't talk about race differences even though I believe them (link to apophasis/hypocritical humor)
my history of email exchanges with the Popular Author being demanding
posting on LW because it's the conversational locus https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8rYxw9xZfwy86jkpG/on-the-importance-of-less-wrong-or-another-single
+
+M.L. Morris "Vocational Interests in the United States" d=1.7 on occupational preferences
+
+playing for scraps vs. playing for keeps https://twitter.com/DarrenJBeattie/status/1151902363059392512
+
+You can't optimize your group's culture for not-talking-about-atheism without also optimizing against understanding Occam's razor; you can't optimize for not questioning gender self-identity without also optimizing against understanding "A Human's Guide to Words."
+
+I didn't not have any reason to _invent the hypotheses_ that I had some undiagnosed brain-intersex condition, or that I was literally a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
+
+Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems pretty obvious, really?
+
+[This is something where I _actually need the right answer_]
+
+Ultimately, I think this is a pedagogy decision that Eliezer got right. If you write your summary slogan in relativist language, people predictably take that as license to believe whatever they want without having to defend it. Whereas if you write your summary slogan in objectivist language—so that people know they don't have social permission to say that "it's subjective so I can't be wrong"—then you have some hope of sparking a useful discussion about the exact, precise ways that specific, definite things are, in fact, relative to other specific, definite things.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff