* 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)
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.
+
+
+Great at free speech norms, there's a level above free speech where you _converge on the right answer
+
+(I cried my tears for three good years; you can't be mad at me.)
+
+a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation
+
+Technical mistake
+
+_politically load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
+
+
+https://economicsofgender.tumblr.com/post/188438604772/i-vaguely-remember-learning-trans-women-are : "for a while nobody argued about the truth or implications of 'trans women are women.' It would be like arguing over whether, in fact, the birthday boy really gets the first piece of cake."
+
+
+So, while I have been seeking out a coalition/bandwagon/flag-rally for the past few weeks, I've tried to be pretty explicit about only expecting buy-in for a minimal flag that says, "'I Can Define a Word Any Way I Want' can't be the end of the debate, because choosing to call things different names doesn't change the empirical cluster-structure of bodies and minds in the world; while the same word might legitimately be used with different definitions/extensions in different contexts, the different definitions imply different probabilistic inferences, so banning one definition as hurtful is an epistemic issue that rationalists should notice because it makes it artificially more expensive to express probabilistic inferences that can be expressed concisely with that definition."
+
+I do usually mention the two-types model at the same time because that's where I think the truth is and it's hard to see the Bayes-structure-of-language problem without concrete examples. (Why is it that that only ~3% of women-who-happen-to-be-cis identify as lesbians, but 60% of women-who-happen-to-be-trans do? If you're careful, you can probably find a way to encode the true explanation in a way that doesn't offend anyone. But if you want to be able to point to the truth concisely—in a way that fits in a Tweet, or to an audience that doesn't know probabilistic graphical models—then "Because trans women are men" needs to be sayable. You don't need to say it when it's not relevant or if a non-rationalist who might be hurt by it is in the room, but it can't be unsayable.)
+
+Do I need to be much louder about the "This philosophy-of-language point can be accepted independently of any empirical claims" disclaimer and much quieter about the empirical claims, because literally no one understands disclaimers!?
+
+(I don't think I'd be saying this in the nearby possible world where Scott Siskind didn't have a traumatizing social-justice-shaming experience in college, but it's true here.)
+
+I don't want to fall into the bravery-debate trap of, "Look at me, I'm so heroically persecuted, therefore I'm right (therefore you should have sex with me)."
+
+
+Strongly agree with this. I have some misgivings about the redpilly coalition-seeking I've been doing recently. My hope has been that it's possible to apply just enough "What the fuck kind of rationalist are you?!" social pressure to cancel out the "You don't want to be a Bad (Red) person, do you??" social pressure and thereby let people look at the arguments. I don't know if that actually works.
+
+"Moshe": "People rightly distrust disclaimers and nearly no one except me & Michael can say so instead of acting like it’s common knowledge with people who don’t fully know this."
+
+Standards! https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/12/24/contrite-strategies-and-the-need-for-standards/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff