what about _my_ mental health?
-Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women? We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really?
-my friend thinks I'm naive to have expected such a community—she was recommending "What You Can't Say" in 2009—but in 2009, we did not expect that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue, which is new evidence about the wisdom of the original vision
+Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill
+
but if my expectations (about the community) were wrong, that's a problem with my model; reality doesn't have to care
won't you be embarrassed to leave if we create utopia
+won't all those trans women be embarrassed after the singularity
+
invent a fake epistemology lesson
we live in a world where reason doesn't work
The "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want" argument is bullshit. All the actually-smart people know that it's bullshit at _some_ level, perhaps semi-consciously buried under a lot of cognitive dissonance. But it's _socially load-bearing_ bullshit that _not only_ does almost no one have an incentive to correct—
+
+
But no one has the incentive to correct the mistake in public.
+"woah, [toddler]'s learning about the facts of life
+[friend]'s explaining about how some parts usually get covered and about how some people don't have penises and stuff"
"Some people don't have penises" ... can you be a little more specific?!
+same person: "people do tend to present as their genders"
+
politicizing the question of what 2 + 2 should equal
Aumann is an Orthodox Jew
https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/
- the elephant in my brain has been using "I'm going to be in incredible emotional pain until I write the story down" as a precommitment device
+(And if you should prefer to model the pain as having been manufactured by the [elephant in my brain](http://elephantinthebrain.com/) as a game-theoretic precommitment to force conscious-me to write in the face of social incentives that would otherwise make silence feel safer, you should know that only real pain is a credible threat.)
If an Outer Party member in the world of George Orwell's 1984 says, "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia," even though they clearly remember events from last week, when Oceania was at war with Eurasia instead [...] even if it's not really their fault
I mean, this is the part where I do a very not Effective Altruist-themed thing, and stop talking as if I do anything for the good of the lightcone. (Maybe see Ben on "Against Responsibility" and "The Humility Argument for Honesty".) I internalized a particular vision [...] of what conduct is appropriate to a "rationalist"; I'm didn't that standard upheld with respect to my Something to Protect; so I am doing a halt–melt–catch-fire on "the community." It's worth starting over over _for me_. If my actions (implausibly) represent a PR risk to someone else's Singularity strategy, then they're welcome to try to persuade or negotiate with me.
-
the appeal to arbitrariness technically extends in both directions (if there's no rule saying you can't use the word to talk about self-identity, there's no rule saying I can't use the word to talk about sex), but systematically favors one side—sex is a pretty robust abstraction, and there's no reason to deny the appeal of robustness
-https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/
+https://wnww.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/
Inadequate Equilibria!
I'm expressing the same kind of frustration as the Great Teacher complaining about cryo not being standard—my personal benchmark of "sanity" isn't realistic
+
+there's a sense in which everyone is behaving reasonably given their incentives, but
+
+"Concessions" don't help: even if people will grant some of my points if I threaten to walk, that's not a truth-seeking discourse process that systematically responds to arguments and evidence
+
+Julia Serano
+
+You "can't" define a word any way you want, or you "can"—what actually matters is the math
+
+words don't have intrinsic definitions, but the only reason you would want to repurpose an _existing_ word is either becasuse you think you can carve the joints better, or mindfucking
+
+cat/dog gaslighting; even if you don't particularly need that particular classification for a practical purpose, even so ...
+
+fame: arguing with a Discord server was low-impact compared to getting the leadership on board
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CEGnJBHmkcwPTysb7/lonely-dissent
+
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/does-age-bring-wisdom/
+
+> Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it's considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it–or say it only in a very careful way–in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of "low-status" and "bad and wrong" have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it's true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it's in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it's true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don't know how many times it's slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement.
+
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#comment-W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF
+> I am skeptical that either sex can ever really model and predict the other's deep internal life, short of computer-assisted telepathy. These are different brain designs we're talking about here.
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2
+
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions
+
+> Jun 18, 2008
+> this is too perfectly terrifying, too terrifyingly perfect
+>
+> My search for not-previously-read Eliezer Yudkowsky material was getting kind of pathetic--I'd gotten to the point of reading his old messages in the archives of the extropians mailing list. And then I read this:
+>
+> http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html
+>
+> --and the worst thing is that I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused? I'm not going to read the replies right now. I have work to do, and--and I'm too floored? _I'm just not built to handle this sort of thing_. I remain,
+>
+> Zachary Michael Davis
+
+Arguing with a specific person's published words is important, because otherwise you can strawman
+
+[Am I the asshole?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/)
+
+(I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my 72-hour (== 3 days) evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone.)
+
+blegg commentary: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GEJzPwY8JedcNX2qz/blegg-mode#aAgSDZ4ddHpzj9fNN
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff