-**(I typically eschew the use of boldface in prose, but will be bolding key sentences in this post as a strategic concession to people's lack of reading comprehension.)**
+**(I typically eschew the use of boldface in prose, but will be bolding key phrases and sentences in this post as a strategic concession to people's lack of reading comprehension.)**
---
-**Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.**
+**Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** I'm _not_ trying to tell other people how to live their lives, because _that would be crazy_. I am obviously _not smart enough_ to tell other people what they should do _and get the right answer_. True, I am skeptical of currently-popular _theories_ of how gender works and how gender dysphoria works,[^concepts] because I think they are _false_ in certain knowable aspects and that I have a more accurate view in certain knowable aspects. That is _not the same thing_ as telling people to detransition! Maybe lots _more_ people should transition! But in order to _figure out_ what the correct decisions are—or what the best decisions are conditional on your axiomatic subjective values—we need to **get the theory right**. That's what I'm _trying_ to do. It would be nice to have some help!
-----
-
-As an illustration of how [the hope for radical human enhancement is fraught with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard) technical difficulties, ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.
-
-It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on this blog eight times. In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 mailing list post](http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html) that was its predecessor. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for content by the Great Teacher that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
-
-The argument goes: it might be easy to _imagine_ changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no [plug-and-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex. And even that's not _really_ a sex change, as far as the whole integrated system is concerned—
-
-> Remapping the connections from the remapped somatic areas to the pleasure center will ... give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less. That doesn't make you a woman. You'd still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
-
-But from the standpoint of my secret erotic fantasy, this is actually a _great_ outcome.
-
-[...]
-
-> If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don't think I'd call her "me". The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.
-
-In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)—
+[^concepts]: And indeed, whether "gender" and "gender dysphoria" are exactly the right concepts.
-> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is _No_?
-
-To which I now realize the correct answer is: Yes, it's fucking cheating! The map is not the territory! You can't change the current _referent_ of "personal identity" with the semantic mind game of declaring that "personal identity" now refers to something else! How dumb do you think we are?! (But more on this later.)
-
------
+----
Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill?
Okay, I understand that in Berkeley 2020, that probably sounds like some kind of reactionary political statement, probably intended to provoke. But try interpreting it _literally_, as a _factual claim_ about the world. Adult human males who _fantasize about_ being adult human females, are still neverless drawn from the _male_ multivariate trait distribution, not the female distribution.
-It seems useful to be able to _express this claim in natural language_. I can phrase the claim in more or fewer words, using a greater or lesser amount of caveats, qualifications, or polysyllabic obfuscations, depending on my audience's sensibilities and what aspects of my model I want to call attention to. But I need to be able to talk about the model _somehow_, and talking about the model becomes _more expensive_ if I'm not occasionally allowed to use the phrase "actual woman" in a context where _you know goddamned well_ what I mean by it.
+It seems useful to be able to _express this claim in natural language_. I can phrase the claim in more or fewer words, using a greater or lesser amount of caveats, qualifications, or polysyllabic obfuscations, depending on my audience's sensibilities and what aspects of my model I want to call attention to. But I need to be able to talk about the model _somehow_, and talking about the model becomes _more expensive_ if I'm not occasionally allowed to use the phrase "actual woman" in a context where [_you know goddamned well_ what I mean by it](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/).
I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing. (Nonhuman animal welfare! Termite-proof-ness!) One might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ trans women to the real thing. (Though I still feel uncomfortable trying to think of any in particular.) The _point_ is that I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes the _original_ thing, from the artificial thing that's trying to mimic its form while not being exactly the same thing, either by design or due to technological limitations.
The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about.
-I can be polite in most circumstances, as the price of keeping the peace in Society. But it is a price, a cost—and it's a _cognitive_ cost, the cost of _destroying information_ that would make people uncomfortable. Systematically correct reasoners needn't _mention_ the cost in most circumstances (that would not be polite), but we should at least be able to refrain from indulging in clever not-technically-lying sophistry that tries to _make it look like there's no cost_.
+I can be polite in most circumstances, as the price of keeping the peace in Society. But it is a price, a cost—and it's a _cognitive_ cost, the cost of _destroying information_ that would make people uncomfortable. Systematically correct reasoners needn't _mention_ the cost in most circumstances (that would not be polite), but we should at least be able to refrain from indulging in clever [not-technically-lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying) sophistry that tries to _make it look like there's no cost_.
-----
-If we _actually had_ the magical sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument.
+If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these clever category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language (pronouns and more) because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument, but using the _same_ ordinary word-choice algorithms that they used for everything else. The fact that people keep inventing these clever category-gerrymandering mind games and refuse to engage when one of their peers or students spends thousands of words explaining why this is not how we do philosophy, is an indication that _something has gone very wrong_.[^motherfuckers]
+
+[^motherfuckers]: We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers!
-If it cost $200K, I would just take out a bank loan and _do it_.
+If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
+
+(Though I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
+[^two-words]: For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "transwoman" is cissexist, because "trans" is properly an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+Since we _don't_ have magical perfect sex change technology, but do have
Not because I like my voice, but because
-[trans woman one word]
[maybe it woudl be a good idea ten years ago]
-----
I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend Irene a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman."
-**If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and you can model it as a duck without making any grevious prediction errors, then it makes sense to call it a "duck" in the range of circumstances that your model continues to be useful**, even if a pedant might point out that it's really an [Anatid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatidae)-[oid](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-oid#Suffix) robot, or that that species is technically a goose.
+**If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and you can model it as a duck without making any grevious prediction errors, then it makes sense to call it a "duck" in the range of circumstances that your model continues to be useful**, even if a pedant might point out that it's really ("really") an [Anatid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatidae)-[oid](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-oid#Suffix) robot, or that that species is technically a goose.
-----
----
-So, if I _agree_ that pronouns aren't lies, why was I so freaked out by this?
-
-[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+So, if I _agree_ that pronouns aren't lies—if I can't point to I single sentence in the Twitter thread that I think is outright indisputably false, why was I so freaked out by this?
-https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
+Well. It is [written of the fourth virtue](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/): "If you are selective about which arguments you inspect for flaws, or how hard you inspect for flaws, then every flaw you learn how to detect makes you that much stupider." It is likewise [written of reversed stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence):
+> **To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.** [bolding mine—M.T.S.W.] Arguing against weaker advocates proves _nothing_, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates.
+Certainly, _there exist_ people out that are guilty of the ontological error that the Great Teacher is criticizing here, but the thread is written in a way that seems to suggest that there aren't any _better_ possible reasons why someone might object to Twitter's anti-misgendering policy. The Popular Author once wrote about how this kind of [motivated selective attention paid to weak arguments "are meant to re-center a category"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/)[^re-center]:
-The Popular Author once wrote about how [motivated selective attention paid to weak arguments "are meant to re-center a category"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/):
+[^re-center]: Almost as if the Popular Author believes that moving category boundaries around has epistemic consequences!
> The guy whose central examples of religion are Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama is probably going to have a different perception of religion than the guy whose central examples are Torquemada and Fred Phelps. If you convert someone from the first kind of person to the second kind of person, you've gone most of the way to making them an atheist.
> More important, if you convert a culture from thinking in the first type of way to thinking in the second type of way, then religious people will be unpopular and anyone trying to make a religious argument will have to spend the first five minutes of their speech explaining how they're not Fred Phelps, honest, and no, they don't picket any funerals. After all that time spent apologizing and defending themselves and distancing themselves from other religious people, they're not likely to be able to make a very rousing argument for religion.
+
+[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+
+https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
+
----
-Some readers who aren't part of my robot cult—and some who are—might be puzzled at why I was so emotionally disturbed by people being wrong about philosophy. And for almost anyone else in the world, I would just shrug and [set the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to).
+Some readers who aren't part of my robot cult—and maybe some who are but didn't drink as many cups of the Kool-Aid as I did—might be puzzled at why I've been _so freaked out_ for _an entire year_ (!?!) by people being wrong about philosophy. And for almost anyone else in the world, I would just shrug, [set the bozo bit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_bit#Dismissing_a_person_as_not_worth_listening_to), and move on with my day. But when the _universally-acknowledged leading thinkers of my robot cult_ do it ...
+
+Even people who aren't religious still have the same [species-typical psychological mechanisms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind) that make religions work. The systematically-correct-reasoning community had come to fill a [similar niche in my psychology as a religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p5DmraxDmhvMoZx8J/church-vs-taskforce). I knew this, but the _hope_ was that this wouldn't come with the pathologies of a religion, because _our_ pseudo-religion was _about_ the rules of systematically correct reasoning. The system is _supposed_ to be self-correcting: if people are obviously, _demonstratably_ wrong, all you have to do is show them the argument that they're wrong, and then they'll understand the obvious argument and change their minds.
+
+So to get a sense of the emotional impact here, imagine being a devout Catholic hearing their local priest deliver a sermon that _blatantly_ contradicts something said in the Bible—or at least, will predictably be interpreted by the typical parishioner as contradicting the obvious meaning of the Bible, even if the sermon also admits some contrived interpretation that's _technically_ compatible with the Bible. Suppose it's an ever-so-slightly-alternate-history 2014, and the sermon suggests that Christians who oppose same-sex marriage have no theological ground to stand on.
+
+You _know_ this is wrong. Okay, maybe there's _some_ way that same-sex marriage could be compatible with the Church's teachings. But you would have to _argue_ for that; you _can't_ just say there's no arguments _against_ it and call that the end of the discussion! [1 Corinthians 6:9–10](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A9-10&version=NKJV): "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators [...] nor homosexuals, nor sodomites [...] will inherit the kingdom of God." It's _right there_. There's [a bunch of passages like that](https://www.livingout.org/the-bible-and-ssa). You _can't possibly_ not see it.
-Even people who aren't religious still have the same [species-typical psychological mechanisms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind) that make religions work. The systematically-correct-reasoning community had come to fill a [similar niche in my psychology as a religious community](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p5DmraxDmhvMoZx8J/church-vs-taskforce). I knew this, but the _hope_ was that this wouldn't come with the pathologies of a religion, because our pseudo-religion was _about_ the rules of systematically correct reasoning. The system is _supposed_ to be self-correcting: if people are obviously, _demonstratably_ wrong, all you have to do is show them the argument that they're wrong, and then they'll understand the obvious argument and change their minds.
+As a man of faith and loyal parishioner, you would _expect_ to be able to resolve the matter by bringing your concern to the priest, who would then see how the sermon had been accidentally misleading, and issue a clarification at next week's sermon, so that the people would not be led astray from the path of God.
-So to get a sense of the emotional impact here, imagine a devout Catholic hearing a sermon by their local priest deliver a sermon that says "Sin is good"—or will be predictably interpreted as saying that. [...]
+The priest doesn't agree; he insists on the contrived technically-not-heresy interpretation. This would be a shock, but it wouldn't, yet, shatter your trust in the Church as an institution. Even the priest is still a flawed mortal man.
+
+Then the Pope misinterets the Bible in the same way in his next encyclical. With the help of some connections, you appeal your case all the way to the Vatican—and the Pope himself comes back with the same _bullshit_ technically-not-heresy.
+
+You realize that you _cannot take the Pope's words literally_.
+
+That would be _pretty upsetting_, right? To lose faith in, not your religion itself—_obviously_ the son of God still died for our sins—but the _institution_ that claims to faithfully implement your religion, but is actually doing something else. You can understand why recovering from that might take a year or so.
+
+(Alternate-alternate title for this post: "[37](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) Theses".)
Or maybe imagine an idealistic young lawyer working for the prosecution in the [Selective Draft Law Cases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Draft_Law_Cases) challenging the World War I draft. Since 1865, the Constitution _says_, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." If the words "involuntary servitude not as a punishment for a crime" _mean anything_, they surely include the draft. So the draft is unconstitutional. Right?
[...]
+MASSIVE cognitive dissonance, "What? What???"
+
This is my fault. It's [not like we weren't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yEjaj7PWacno5EvWa/every-cause-wants-to-be-a-cult).
----
+[univariate fallacy]
+
Humans are _pretty good_ at noticing each other's sex. In one study, subjects were able to descriminate between photographs of female and male faces (hair covered, males clean-shaven) with 96% accuracy.[^face] This even though there's no _single_ facial feature that cleanly distinguishes females and males
-[^face]: Vicki Bruce, A. Mike Burton, _et al._, "Sex discrimination: how do we tell the difference between male and female faces?"
+[^face]: Vicki Bruce, A. Mike Burton, _et al._, ["Sex discrimination: how do we tell the difference between male and female faces?"](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), _Perception_, Vol 22, Issue 2 (1993)
----
But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
-If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where the community doesn't exist at all—
+If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. In the same way, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health.
+
+The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2019 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
+
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+
+
+Someone told me:
+
+"It's better if 10 Saotome-Westlake-class people address higher priority issues before moving to lower priority ones. If your reference class a million people, then AI safety would have $100BB+ resources and piles of engineers"
+
+
+
-----
+[Insert this after first mention of Great Teacher/Popular Author]
+
I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm ... expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputational attack on my friends and (former??) heroes—at least, not more than it needs to be. I just _need to tell the story_.
I'd almost rather we all pretend this narrative was written in a ["nearby" Everett branch](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9cgBF6BQ2TRB3Hy4E/and-the-winner-is-many-worlds) whose history diverged from ours maybe forty-five years ago—a world almost exactly like our own as far as the macro-scale institutional and ideological forces at play, but with different individual people filling out the relevant birth cohorts. _My_ specific identity doesn't matter; the specific identities of any individuals I mention while telling my story don't matter. What matters is the _structure_: I'm just a sample from the _distribution_ of what happens when an American upper-middle-class high-Openness high-Neuroticism late-1980s-birth-cohort IQ-130 78%-Ashkenazi obligate-autogynephilic boy falls in with this kind of robot cult in this kind of world.
(2) "Woman" is a noun.
(3) _Therefore_, you can't define "woman" any way you want without cognitive consequences.
-Note, **(3) is _entirely compatible_ with trans women being women**. The point is that if you want to claim that trans women are women, you need some sort of _argument_ for why that categorization makes sense in the context you want to use the word—why that map usefully reflects some relevant aspect of the territory. If you want to _argue_ that hormone replacement therapy constitutes an effective sex change, or that trans is a brain-intersex condition and the brain is the true referent of "gender", or that [coordination constraints on _shared_ categories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [support the self-identification criterion](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), that's fine, because those are _arguments_ that someone who initially disagreed with your categorization could _engage with on the merits_. In contrast, "I can define a word any way I want" can't be engaged with in the same way because it's a denial of the possibility of merits.
+Note, **(3) is _entirely compatible_ with trans women being women**. The point is that if you want to claim that trans women are women, you need some sort of _argument_ for why that categorization makes sense in the context you want to use the word—why that map usefully reflects some relevant aspect of the territory. **If you want to _argue_ that trans women are women** _because_ hormone replacement therapy constitutes an effective sex change, or that trans is a brain-intersex condition and the brain is the true referent of "gender", or that [coordination constraints on _shared_ categories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [support the self-identification criterion](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), that's fine, because **those are _arguments_ that someone who initially disagreed with your choice of categorization could _engage with on the merits_.** In contrast, **"I can define a word any way I want" can't be engaged with in the same way because it's a denial of the possibility of merits.**
------
-Here's what I think is going on. _After it's been pointed out_, all the actually-smart people can see that "Useful categories need to 'carve reality at the joints', and there's no reason for gender to magically be an exception to this _general_ law of cognition" is a better argument than "I can define the word 'woman' any way I want." No one is going to newly voice the Stupid Argument now that it's _known_ that I'm hanging around ready to pounce on it.
+[happy price, symmetry-breaking]
+
+As I've observed, being famous must _suck_.
+
+-----
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
+
+The Popular Author
+
+"People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most."
+
+[lightning post assumes invicibility]
+
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
-But the people who have _already_ voiced the Stupid Argument can't afford to reverse themselves, even if they're the sort of _unusually_ epistemically virtuous person who publicly changes their mind on other topics. It's too politically expensive to say, "Oops, that _specific argument_ for why I support transgender people was wrong for trivial technical reasons, but I still support transgender people because ..." because political costs are imposed by a mob that isn't smart enough to understand the concept of "bad argument for a conclusion that could still be true for other reasons." So I can't be allowed to win the debate in public.
+> And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.
-The game theorist Thomas Schelling once wrote about the use of clever excuses to help one's negotiating counterparty release themselves from a prior commitment: "One must seek [...] a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."[^schelling]
+Have to?!
-[^schelling]: _Strategy of Conflict_, Ch. 2, "An Essay on Bargaining"
+The Popular Author obviously never wanted to be the center of a personality cult; it just happened to him anyway because he's better at writing than everyone else.
-This is sort of what I was trying to do when soliciting—begging for—engagement-or-endorsement of "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" I thought that it ought to be politically feasible to _just_ get public consensus from Very Important People on the _general_ philosophy-of-language issue, stripped of the politicized context that inspired my interest in it, and complete with math and examples about dolphins and job titles. That _should_ be completely safe. If some would-be troublemaker says, "Hey, doesn't this contradict what you said about trans people earlier?", stonewall them. (Stonewall _them_ and not _me_!) Thus, the public record about philosophy is corrected without the VIPs having to suffer a social-justice scandal. Everyone wins, right?
+-----
-But I guess that's not how politics works. Somehow, the mob-punishment mechanisms that aren't smart enough to understand the concept of "bad argument for a true conclusion", _are_ smart enough to connect the dots between my broader agenda and my (correct) abstract philosophy argument, such that VIPs don't think they can endorse my _correct_ philosophy argument, without it being _construed as_ an endorsement of me and my detailed heresies, even though (a) that's _retarded_ (it's possible to agree with someone about a particular philosophy argument, while disagreeing with them about how the philosophy argument applies to a particular object-level case), and (b) I would have _hoped_ that explaining the abstract philosophy problem in the context of dolphins would provide enough plausible deniability to defend against _retarded people_ who want to make everything about politics.
+In sexually-reproducing species, [complex functional adaptations in are necessarily species-universal _up to sex_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind), because adaptations have to evolve incrementally: you don't have selection pressure for an allele for a ever-so-slightly-improved eye, until all the pieces for the unimproved eye are already at fixation and won't get immediately [reshuffled during meiosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_crossover) in the next generation.
-The situation I'm describing is already pretty fucked, but it would be just barely tolerable if the actually-smart people were good enough at coordinating to _privately_ settle philosophy arguments. If someone says to me, "You're right, but I can't admit this in public because it would be too politically-expensive for me," I can't say I'm not _disappointed_, but I can respect that they labor under constraints
+(That is: evolutionary psychology is impressively anti-racist, but _super_ sexist.)
-[people can't trust me to stably keep secrets]
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions
-The Stupid Argument isn't just a philosophy mistake—it's a _socially load-bearing_ philosophy mistake.
+"the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value. [...] There are many such shards of desire, all different values."
-And _that_ is intolerable. Once you have a single socially load-bearing philosophy mistake, you don't have a systematically-correct-reasoning community anymore. What you have is a _cult_. If you _notice_ that your alleged systematically-correct-reasoning community has a load-bearing philosophy mistake, and you _go on_ acting as if it were a systematically-correct-reasoning community, then you are committing _fraud_. (Morally speaking. I don't mean a sense of the word "fraud" that could be upheld in a court of law.)
----
-[trade arrangments: if that's the world we live in, fine]
+So far, I've mostly been linking to [Anne Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) or [Kay Brown](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/) for the evidence for this rather than writing up my own take (I already have enough problems with writing quickly, that I don't feel motivated to spend wordcount making a case that other people have already made), but maybe that was a tactical mistake on my part, because people don't click links, and so if I don't include at least _some_ of the evidence inline in my own text, hostile readers (that's you!) will write me off as making unjustified assertions.
-------
+And honestly, realistically? I suspect it _mostly_ wasn't the research literature that convinced me, as unscientific as that sounds to say out loud. (This blog is not about sounding scientific.) Research can obfuscate as well as clarify. Even a very educated layman can be brought to vexation looking back and forth between Lawrence and [Veale](/papers/veale-evidence_against_a_typology.pdf), struggling to look up the definitions of complicated statistics, all the MAXCOVs and _p_ values and Cohen's ω (he has an _omega_, too?!—but I'd grown [so comfortable with _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)), before eventually throwing her hands up in despair: who am I to know? Who is anyone to know?
-[happy price, symmetry-breaking]
+So if it wasn't the science literature, what was it? It was a _lot_ of things all pointing in the same direction, but _impossible_ to dismiss once you knew what to look for, even after taking into account that the phrase "once you know what to look for" is a 20-meter fire-truck-red flag for [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positive-bias-look-into-the-dark).
-As I've observed, being famous must _suck_.
+I'm talking about shit like—okay, here's one example. In April 2018, the /r/MtF subreddit [put up a survey](http://archive.is/auSxF) asking, "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?" (The poll website itself uses the phrase "before you hatched", a reference to the terminology of pre-transition trans women as "eggs.") Results come back [82.4% Yes, with over 2000 responses](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment on the Reddit thread](https://old.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/dws9h8k/), with some 230 upvotes: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp."
------
+Perhaps some readers are still scoffing at how unscientific this is. Reddit? I expect you to doubt Society's narrative on gender identity is false based on a _Reddit poll_? But think about it. /r/MtF has over 67,000 subscribers.
-https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
+[80 is not 100, but]
+[AGP makes this look less confusing, the feminine essence narrative can't handle it]
+[the research literature says the same dang thing, up to the ~80% figures!]
-The Popular Author
+I picked on this poll as my first exhibit just because the poll question was _so_ explicit, and the sample size _so_ large, but once you stop being blinded by the Narrative, this stuff is just _not hard to find_.
-"People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most."
+I bought famed trans activist Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ in 2007, when it was new. Again, back then, I didn't think _I_ was Actually Trans—didn't think Serano and I belonged to the same natural category. I was just the kind of straight boy who
-[lightning post assumes invicibility]
+It was a _shock_ reading it again a decade later and seeing [how many clues I missed](/2016/Sep/apophenia/). Serano writes—
-The Popular Author definitely isn't trying to be cult leader. He just
+> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
-----
+I don't doubt Serano's report of her own _experiences_. But "it became obvious that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience!_ I [don't _expect_ anyone to be able to get that sort of thing right from introspection alone!](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
+
+-----
-The "national borders" metaphor is particularly galling if—[unlike](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/) [the](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/) Popular Author—you _actually know the math_.
+If I sound angry, it's because I actually do feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. A trans woman I know thinks I'm suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to Objectivity and Reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order via scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
-If I have a "blegg" concept for blue egg-shaped objects—uh, this is [our](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) [standard](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yFDKvfN6D87Tf5J9f/neural-categories) [example](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside), just [roll with it](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)—what that _means_ is that (at some appropriate level of abstraction) there's a little [Bayesian network](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) in my head with "blueness" and "eggness" observation nodes hooked up to a central "blegg" category-membership node, such that if I see a black-and-white photograph of an egg-shaped object, I can use the observation of its shape to update my beliefs about its blegg-category-membership, and then use my beliefs about category-membership to update my beliefs about its blueness. This cognitive algorithm is useful if we live in a world where objects that have the appropriate statistical structure—if the joint distribution P(blegg, blueness, eggness) approximately factorizes as P(blegg)·P(blueness|blegg)·P(eggness|blegg).
+I have [no grounds to fault her for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), but I still think she's reading me wrong.
-"Category boundaries" are just a _visual metaphor_ for the math: the set of things I'll classify as a blegg with probability greater than _p_ is conveniently _visualized_ as an area with a boundary in blueness–eggness space. If you _don't understand_ the relevant math and philosophy—or are pretending not to understand only and exactly when it's politically convenient—you might think you can redraw the boundary any way you want. But you can't, because the "boundary" visualization is _derived from_ a statistical model which corresponds to _empirically testable predictions about the real world_.
+[agree that scapegoating is real]
-Fucking with category boundaries corresponds to fucking with the model, which corresponds to fucking with your ability to interpret sensory data. The only two reasons you could _possibly_ want to do this would be to wirehead yourself (corrupt your map to make the territory look nicer than it really is, making yourself _feel_ happier at the cost of sabotaging your ability to navigate the real world) or as information warfare (corrupt shared maps to sabotage other agents' ability to navigate the real world, in a way such that you benefit from their confusion).
+acknowleding my complicity:
+/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
+/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
+
+"notice when I succumb to anti-gender-variance social pressure in real life." /2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/
-----
-[psychological unity of humankind and sex]
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind
+[You "can't" define a word any way you want, or you "can"—what actually matters is the math]
----
-[ppl don't click links—quick case for AGP—80% is not 100, but]
+[leaning on "Travis" for social proof]
+
+----
+
+[on Failed-Utopia 4-2: lesiban trans women are essentially this in real life]
-----
-["delusional perverts", no one understands me]
+> [Replies here should](https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/dvkv41/meta_reducing_negativity_on_rrational/f7fs88l/) still follow the etiquette of saying "Mileage varied: I thought character X seemed stupid to me" rather than saying "No, character X was actually quite stupid."
+
+But "I thought X seemed Y to me" and "X is Y" _do not mean the same thing_. [The map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KJ9MFBPwXGwNpadf2/skill-the-map-is-not-the-territory). [The quotation is not the referent](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). [The planning algorithm that maximizes the probability of doing a thing is different from an algorithm that maximizes the probability of having "tried" to do the thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLJwTJ7uGPA5Qphbp/trying-to-try).
+
+Social norms that require claims to be made as "I" statements are adapted for _minimizing social conflict_. In the absence of mind-reading technology whose reliability is common knowledge, assertions about the content of your own map are unchallengable. If everyone is forced to only make narcissitic claims about their map ("_I_ think", "_I_ feel"), and not make claims about the territory (which could be construed to call other people's maps into question), that's
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff