-As an illustration of how the hope for radical human enhancement is [fraught with technical difficulties](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), ["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.
+Since we _don't_ have magical perfect sex change technology, but do have
-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?"
+Not because I like my voice, but because
-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.
+[maybe it woudl be a good idea ten years ago]
+------
+[document (with archive links) what EY said]
+
+---
-In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)—
+[pronouns do have truth conditions]
-> 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 cheating! The map is not the territory!
+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?
+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.
-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?
+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]:
-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. Men (adult human males) who _fantasize about_ being women (adult human females), are still neverless drawn from the _male_ multivariate trait distribution, not the female distribution.
+[^re-center]: Almost as if the Popular Author believes that moving category boundaries around has epistemic consequences!
-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.
+> 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.
+
+----
-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.
+[...]
-Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
+MASSIVE cognitive dissonance, "What? What???"
-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,
+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).
----
-An aside: being famous must _suck_. I haven't experienced this myself, but I'm sure it's true.
+[univariate fallacy]
-Oh, sure, it's nice to see your work get read and appreciated by people—I've experienced that much. (Shout-out to my loyal fans—all three of you![^fans]) But when you're _famous_, everybody wants a piece of you. The fact that your work influences _so many_ people, makes you a _target_ for anyone who wants to indirectly wield your power for their own ends. Every new author wants you to review their book; every ideologue wants you on their side ...
+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
-And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mistake that impinges on their interests, they might spend an _unreasonable_ amount of effort obsessively trying to argue with you about it.
+[^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)
-[^fans]: I'm specifically thinking of W.E., R.S., and [Sophia](http://unremediatedgender.space/author/sophia/).
+------
----
+[happy price, symmetry-breaking]
-[document (with archive links) what EY said]
+As I've observed, being famous must _suck_.
----
+-----
-[pronouns do have truth conditions]
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/
-----
+The Popular Author
-So, if I _agree_ that pronouns aren't lies, why was I so freaked out by this?
+"People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most."
-[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+[lightning post assumes invicibility]
-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/):
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
-> 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.
+> 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.
-> 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.
+Have to?!
+
+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.
+
+-----
+
+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 kidney, until all the pieces for the unimproved kidney are already at fixation and won't get immediately [reshuffled during meiosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_crossover) in the next generation.
+
+(That is: evolutionary psychology is impressively anti-racist, but _super_ sexist.)
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions
+
+"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."
----
-[Pope who is also Jesus, Selective Draft Law cases]
+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.
-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).
+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?
-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.
+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,
-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. [...]
-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?
+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.
-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).
+[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!]
-----
+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_.
+
+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
+
+It was a _shock_ reading it again a decade later and seeing [how many clues I missed](/2016/Sep/apophenia/). Serano writes—
-[univariate fallacy; I'm a weird guy; I would like to believe there could be a cis woman like me. Not obvious that I acutally know any. My sister is a natural experiment; hands vs. finger; "felt sense"]
+> 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.
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KmghfjH6RgXvoKruJ/hand-vs-fingers
+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/).
+
+-----
+
+
+
+
+"notice when I succumb to anti-gender-variance social pressure in real life." /2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/
+
+-----
+
+[You "can't" define a word any way you want, or you "can"—what actually matters is the math]
----
-Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
+[leaning on "Travis" for social proof]
+[the _astonishing_ regularity in which people will privately agree with my philosophy, but diss my coalition]
-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 conclusions that are "politically impossible" to state clearly in public)
+[on Failed-Utopia 4-2: lesiban trans women are essentially this in real life]
-----
-Sidebar: 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—I just _need to tell the story_.
+> [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."
-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.
+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).
-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. End sidebar.
+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
----
-Schelling: "One must seek, in other words, a rationalization by which to deny oneself too great a reward from the opponent's concession, otherwise the concession will not be made."'— this was basically what I was hoping to do with "Where to Draw The Boundaries?"—I was hoping to get a victory on _just_ the philosophy-of-language part
+This post has been incredibly emotionally difficult to write, because intellectual discourse _shouldn't_ be personal _or_ political. It's easy to write posts of the form, "Smith argues that X, but actually, not-X, because ..." and it doesn't hurt because it's not about Smith or the social pressures acting on her, it's about the balance of evidence and structure of the arguments for and against X. It's only when argument _fails_ and yet you [still have Something to Protect](/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/), that your last recourse is to jump to the meta level and say,
+
+------
+[Dark Side Epistemology]
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