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[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / notes.txt

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@@ -1320,3 +1320,12 @@ True male side/true female side: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCE
 
 policing: "we definitely expect better models of gender out of you": https://twitter.com/atax1a/status/1157066530028265473
 
+I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
+You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
+but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
+which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)—we can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")
+
+older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers [similarly frown on](https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) mentioning race when it's not relevant.)
+
+My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike understanding of objective reality and optimizing the hell out of it" rather than "playing mind games on each other to make it artificially harder to notice that we don't actually live in a Total Morphological Freedom tech regime."
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