One way of describing the trigger for me having gone bezerk starting in February is that I'm horrified that my neoreactionary friends are visibly way smarter than my rationalist friends. This is terrible, because kabbalistically, neoreaction is about being evil, and rationality is about being smart. It is written that being smart is more important than being good for humans (because trying to be good typically involves artificially restricting your hypothesis space; if good people don't permit themselves to even consider X, then they'll have trouble modeling a world in which lots of people make their living off X). But I really didn't expect that, in practice, trying to be evil makes you smarter than trying to be smart does!
-(Okay, I was brainwashed by progressivism pretty hard, but ideologies need to appeal to something in human nature; you can't brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something good in them.)
-
the oscillation between "I'm embarrassed and upset about {thing} that I don't want to acknowledge or explain, but that makes me not want to acknowledge or explain the fact that I feel embarrassed an upset" vs. "Yes, {thing} is real; real things are allowed to appear on maps"
Goodhart's Lawyer (credit "Wilhelm")
13 June: re "lesbian [...] seems actually just implementable in behavior without other resources" ... not even hormone replacement therapy? Frankly, I think this attitude is cruel (in its effects, however benevolent the intentions). Transitioning, or not-transitioning, is a serious life decision with wide-ranging social and medical implications. In order to help people make the right decision—whatever that turns out to be—I want people to have the most accurate information possible and the most precise concepts possible. Getting this stuff right—not just stopping at the first answer that sounds good to your Tumblr followers—is actually decision-relevant to me. In twelve years, it could very well be decision-relevant to Merlin.
+"The problem is not social engineering! The problem is _incompetent_ social engineering! The problem is not experimenting on children! The problem is experimenting on children in the service of an ideological crusade rather than in the service of finding out what happens!" https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154963540980199 (Mike Liked it)
+
-----
smart fascism—
From the inside, you have free choice in the sense that you don't know what you're going to do until you've finished computing it. From the outside, you're a system that can be gamed.
You're always going to be dominated by _someone's_ memeplex. The question is, if you knew more and thought faster, which parts of your current ideology would extrapolated-you construe as parasites, and which as symbiotes? You should, of course, be very suspicious of anyone who thinks they already know the answer. But perhaps it should not be seen as such a incursion to suggest that the answer may surprise you!
+
+----
+
+(Note the clarifying edit Alexander added at the bottom of the post, albeit only after I [threatened to escalate the civil war in our robot cult and spent Christmas Day yelling at him about it](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist/comment/xEan6oCQFDzWKApt7). I'm not proud of my social behavior here, but when everyone you used to trust is seemingly insistent on selectively playing dumb about their own philosophy of language in a way that's optimized to trick you into cutting your dick off (independently of the empirical facts that determine whether cutting your dick off is a good idea), you tend to get desperate.)
+
+----
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/fmg5eps/
+
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16488877
+> independent of the masculinizing effects of gonadal secretions, XY and XX brain cells have different patterns of gene expression that influence their differentiation and function
+
+Don't speak truth to power. Speak truth against your incentive gradient. I mean, _try_ to do that. You can't _literally_ do that, because you're _always_ following your incentive gradient, by definition. Speak truth against your _current model_ of your incentive gradient.
+
+----
+
+Theorem: when you strike at a king, you must kill him. (Credit assignment: Ralph Waldo Emerson.)
+
+My restatement (yours may be different, but still): when you strike at the God-Empress—well, striking at the God-Empress wouldn't work. But when you strike at one of the God-Empress's minions, you have to either kill him or provide sufficiently strong evidence that you could kill him if you wanted.
+
+give sex denialists an inch, and they'll redefine the inch to be a mile
+
+"I had never settled on a form": https://i.redd.it/ygbkj3ock6x31.jpg General factor of ETLE?
+
+https://dsh.fyi/posts/2020-04-14-im-trans-call-me-daisy/
+
+"gender modality" https://www.florenceashley.com/academic-publications.html
+
+I'm not usually—at least, not always—so much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles
+
+https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2019/12/are-cows-adult-bovine-females.html
+https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2020/01/gendered-animal-names-a-postscript.html
+
+marketing opportunity: https://www.peaktrans.org/contact/
+
+https://web.archive.org/web/20160406094634/http://mariacatt.com/2016/03/31/the-adult-baby-story/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff