"Sexual Dimorphism": tail fill
[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / notes.txt
index e3fcb59..bba68c3 100644 (file)
@@ -241,6 +241,7 @@ etymology fun fact: "male" comes from the Latin malus, meaning "bad"
 on a Facebook thread about female-dominated gym classes, a female acquaintance writes, "My class focuses on weightlifting and it's still all women (including one trans, oddly enough)." (You wouldn't say "oddly enough" if you actually believed that trans women are women!)
 
 This is so great (super-AGP 13th century Jewish narrative)
+https://web.archive.org/web/20160420122918/http://www.on1foot.org/text/even-bochan-kalonymus-ben-kalonymus
 http://www.on1foot.org/text/even-bochan-kalonymus-ben-kalonymus
 http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/On-Becoming-A-Woman.pdf
 
@@ -1892,12 +1893,8 @@ people are STILL citing this shit! (14 Nov): https://twitter.com/Baltimoron87/st
 
 Even the enemies respect that post!
 https://twitter.com/KirinDave/status/1275647936194654208
-> And finally, I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting trans-ness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong.
 
 And using it for defense.
-https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790
-> "Who cares about a blog for male nerd know-it-alls?" 
-> The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders.
 
 Two mentions in https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/hhy2yc/what_would_you_put_in_the_essential_ssc_collection/
 
@@ -1912,6 +1909,13 @@ Another new cite: https://twitter.com/FollowSamir/status/1289168867831373825
 
 Another new cite: https://applieddivinitystudies.com/2020/09/05/rationality-winning/
 
+Another new cite: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/kdxbyd/this_blog_is_incredible/gg04f8c/ "My personal favorites among these are [ ], [... Not Man for the Categories], 10, and 2 in that order."
+
+Another new cite: https://twitter.com/rbaron321/status/1361841879445364739
+
+31 December
+"SSC also helped me understand trans issues" https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kng0q4/mixed_feelings_on_scott_alexander/
+
 darwin2500 "Women's leagues are for women, trans women are women. That's all the justification needed" https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hym5xb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_27_2020/fzvfres/
 
 another "Categories Were Made" cite, just as an example post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/survey_on_moving_ssc_to_substack/fzwkfqk/
@@ -1942,9 +1946,6 @@ The one time I posted in /r/GenderCritical, I got a reply that said, "You are a
 
 ----
 
-"My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It" https://archive.is/FJNII
-note, "My Son Wears Dresses", and not, "My Daughter Is Trans"
-
 https://medium.com/@mary.leng/harry-potter-and-the-reverse-voltaire-4c7f3a07241
 
 https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rolltodisbelieve/2020/07/07/j-k-rowling-and-the-measuring-of-a-woman/
@@ -1971,12 +1972,6 @@ https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/freedom-to-thin
 
 https://periodaisle.com/blogs/all/6-transgender-women-talk-menstruation
 
-The time I told an older boy in summer camp that I wasn't into women with big boobs ... but the reality was that I just hadn't hit puberty yet. A parent in today's ideological environment might transition their three-year-old, thinking, "I don't know what the future holds ... but if she doesn't want to go through male puberty, it would be cruel to force her to." But the kid has no way to _know_ that puberty is going to be terrible in advance (I didn't know what it was going to be like, to like breasts), but if the social environment is grooming the kid to be trans, he's likely to _assume_ it's terrible. When I wasn't doing well at Santa Cruz at first, Mom suggested that I take time off or at DVC, and I said, "Are you _trying_ to sabotage my education?" Because I had been groomed to believe in education.
-
-
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=Aq9eWJmK6Liivn8ND
-Never go in against Eliezer Yudkowsky when anything is on the line.
-
 https://arcdigital.media/cancel-clusters-77fada5d7a8a
 
 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/amp/Lecturer-sacked-praising-Jewish-scientists-German-engineers-slams-woke-brigade.html
@@ -2023,7 +2018,7 @@ Andrew Sullivan profile https://archive.is/qviCi
 
 "Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71467-z 
 
-I want to be careful not to fall into the trap of being a generic social conservative. 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."
+I want to be careful not to fall into the trap of being a generic social conservative. 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; 
 
 Doctoral thesis on TG/TF fantasy!
 https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/io1iih/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_07/g4codai/
@@ -2231,3 +2226,221 @@ Julia Serano: "Women who have struggled against patriarchal ideals of what makes
 https://world.wng.org/content/washington_erasing_parents_from_the_equation
 
 "Trans women dropkicked & beat a racist throwing slurs at them. The judge said he deserved it." https://archive.is/MWyIB
+
+https://unherd.com/2020/11/why-i-had-to-leave-the-guardian/
+https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2020/mar/02/women-must-have-the-right-to-organise-we-will-not-be-silenced
+https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/guardian-staff-trans-rights-letter
+
+"Transgender Population Size in the United States: a Meta-Regression of Population-Based Probability Samples" https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303578a
+
+https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7
+
+This is actually good storytelling: https://ericatgswapcaps.blogspot.com/2020/11/magic-friend-zone-curse.html
+
+> Lesbian culture required the taboo to exist, and since it no longer does as religious objections faded, gay and bisexual women overwhelmingly meet and socialize in normal female company like straight women do. 
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/jzbis2/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_november_23/gdtfzuz/
+
+https://eev.ee/blog/2020/06/11/rowling-is-dangerously-wrong/
+https://medium.com/@notCursedE/7-things-trans-people-never-actually-said-1ab5e5ce11da
+
+https://twitter.com/jesstheunstill/status/1334942407897587712
+> This was impressive! I was just in an Software Engineering boot camp at a tech company, and it was lead by two women of color, and the attendees were appx 10 women, 4 men, one non-binary person, and at least half were not white.
+
+https://theprovince.com/news/national/hunter-trans-jailbird-accused-of-sexually-assaulting-female-con/wcm/83654fa7-ef24-475a-a725-c56420a15e46
+
+The tragedy: we do want to help women and minorities, but not the ideological victimhood-identity mind-virus. But if the mind-virus captures all the smart women and minorities at our universities (which women and minorities feel even more pressure to go to than I did!—part of what made my autodidacticism feasible was my white male privilege, that autodidact male geniuses are more believable)
+
+recommended on /r/TheMotte about gestures https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/364
+
+article about the Timnit Gebru paper: https://archive.is/6TX2Y
+
+"Smith College alumni demand 'further training' for white staffer who decried anti-white work environment": https://archive.vn/wzlZD
+
+----
+
+> Do you agree with [people only act confused about biological sex when men wanted something]
+> Do you think that, if you look at the history of biological sex problematization/denialism (in academia, social media, etc), there's more influence from DMAB people than DFAB people?
+
+To your first question: the Tweet says "only reason", which is usually false. (Nodes in a Bayesian network can have multiple parents!) If we amend to "a significant reason, plausibly the most significant reason", then yes, in the following sense.
+
+In the possible world where the parameters of male sexual psychology are such that autogynephilia doesn't exist "but everything else is the same", then I don't think you get the kind and scope of trans-activism movement that Saotome-Westlake's and Adams-Miller's writing is a reaction to. In this world, you still get Judith Butler (AFAB, Gender Trouble published 1990) and Anne Fausto-Sterling (AFAB, Sexing the Body published 2000), but I think you don't get pronoun stickers at conferences in 2018 and you don't get a "three-year-old Merlin Blume is a girl now; she verbally confirmed it!" social-reality enforcement campaign in 2020.
+
+To your second question, it might actually depend on how you operationalize "influence"! Notably, the campaign to trans Merlin (whose parents met on lesswrong.com) is being run predominantly by AFAB people; they're just combatants in the service of an ideology that I don't think would have been so memetically fit if it weren't such a convenient accommodation for AGP. (At least, that's my theory under the doctrine of "algorithmic intent"; the people involved don't think of themselves as combatants in the service of anything.)
+
+----
+
+Two years ago, you wrote: "I wonder how would the rationalist movement (I meant the LessWrong cluster of folks) approach AGP if they could have a completely fresh start? Could there be a way to use the correlation between being intelligent/quantitative and being AGP to break the irrationalist trans ideology?"
+
+Well, I tried. I failed. I'm all out of cards. I blogged; I argued, many times, with everyone who would listen, including local celebrities (Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander). I still have a lot more writing to do for my own scholarly ambitions, but political/education efforts on my native subculture in particular are almost certainly saturated: if we were going to start a Zeitgeist change here, it would have already happened by now.
+
+There hasn't been no effect (people are aware of the typology as a hypothesis, with much thanks to Tailcalled and Ozy's Intellectual Turing Test), but I can't point to anyone doing anything meaningfully differently re impacts on women, our ability to think about sex.
+
+I'm still pretty horrified that the sticking point in discussions seems to have been not the AGP etiology itself (which is what I was focusing on in 2016/2017), but the category-boundaries-are-arbitrary "insight." So it's not just that we failed to break the irrationalist trans ideology: we actually invented something arguably worse! (Ordinary trans activists at least try to make (confused) truth claims; we invented a fully general counteragument against truth claims that's all the more dangerous thanks to the virtue of a very narrow kind of technical correctness.)
+
+-----
+
+https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking
+
+https://www.wired.com/story/science-journals-are-purging-racist-sexist-work-finally/
+https://archive.is/beD9M
+
+https://4w.pub/my-whole-conversation-with-kaitlyn-tiffany-for-the-atlantic/
+https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/reddit-ovarit-the-donald/617320/
+https://archive.is/lqKUe
+
+https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/keira-bell-s-victory-is-an-important-one-for-trans-teenagers
+
+https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9041725/Mum-called-trans-woman-Twitter-CLEARED-wrongdoing.html
+
+"Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage"
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
+"How does hormone transition in transgender women"
+https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/02/28/bjsports-2020-103106
+
+https://impossiblehq.com/well-see/
+
+https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2020/06/black-lives-matter.html
+
+https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/
+
+social pressure on judges
+https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-thorny-problem-of-inconstant-judges.html
+
+"The part is subordinate to the whole: female outliers"
+https://archive.is/UKNjx
+
+https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-teaching/
+
+"Failed Assignments — Rethinking Sex Designations on Birth Certificates" https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2025974
+
+you think you're pumping against the incentive gradient, but actually you're just facing a weird dark-matter incentive landscape
+https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154648983465199
+
+https://graymirror.substack.com/p/61-the-nomos-of-the-earth
+> The past can inspire us; it can teach us; but it can never be our destination.
+
+https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/22/the-gender-heretics-are-finally-winning-the-terf-wars/
+
+https://thoughtsofstone.com/the-day-the-logic-died/
+
+http://bostonreview.net/race-philosophy-religion-gender-sexuality/robin-dembroff-dee-payton-why-we-shouldnt-compare
+
+https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/khaseo/offtopic_and_loweffort_cw_thread_for_the_week_of/gh8kd5q/
+> Give a bunch of men the option to couch their fetish in the trappings of womanhood and they will do so with gusto, and bully their way to the top. Then give women the choice between siding with the men and winning constantly, or side against the men and become a pariah, and the outcome is inevitable.
+
+https://medium.com/@Siltha1.0/caroline-criado-perez-is-a-terf-35c489e59ad9
+
+https://twitter.com/av_rose_ev/status/1340393165090516992
+> Years 3-5 of transition for trans women is recognizing how much of your relationship to your community is contingent upon you performing reproductive labor for your friends because it's the only way they continue to engage you as a woman and yes that includes cracking eggs.
+
+"Richer color vocabulary is associated with better color memory but not color perception" (h/t Sailer https://www.unz.com/isteve/orwell-got-it-right-about-sapir-whorf/)
+https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31046
+
+The "Finer-grained sterotypes" point seems to be a point in favor of "there are more than two genders", but the lack of a clear truth condition is a point against
+
+trans outcome bibliogrpahy comment https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kq3o1s/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_04/gid9v2d/
+
+https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
+
+https://www.praile.net/post/kathleen-stock-obe
+
+"Sleep Deprivation Disrupts Prepulse Inhibition and Induces Psychosis-Like Symptoms in Healthy Humans"
+https://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/27/9134.short
+"Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis With Increasing Time Awake"
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6048360/
+
+https://childrenoftransitioners.org/2021/01/24/the-abusive-autogynephile/
+
+
+https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10158884242629598
+
+> I just read an anecdote in which someone who's never had a penis claimed that "erection states intention", which I think is definitely false and also an extremely harmful thing to incorrectly believe. But I can understand why many cisgendered heterosexual woman would have such a strong impression that this is the case. 
+
+I want to say: 'Why is the reference class here "cisgendered heterosexual women" rather than "biological females"? Cis lebians and trans men and also don't have first-person experience of erections.' ... but that's just going to get into a rabbithole of phalloplasty-penis erections count (where I haven't read the literature)
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/l4ii8x/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_25/gld6zgb/
+"trickle-down narrative economics. [...] The influence of thr NYT isnt best described in absolute value of its readership, but thr social graph of how its ideas penetrate all the way to thr bottom through more complex social networks of influence"
+
+https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/some-early-reader-nominations-for-fits/
+From the comments—"when the NYTimes publishes a bunch of op-eds saying 'believe this' or 'do this' that often actually happens. [...] But when Scott Alexander makes a blog post, things don't happen."
+
+"no matter what we called ourselves, the dynamics stayed the exact same" https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/16208/tifs-need-to-notice-how-little-tims-actually-care-about-them/93e81379-a59b-4135-a5a1-9f5227af8c31#comment-93e81379-a59b-4135-a5a1-9f5227af8c31
+
+> if [...] I had been cis.
+["if I hadn't had dysphoria" vs. "if I had been biologically female are very different counterfactuals!]
+https://twitter.com/liminal_warmth/status/1356490859324170241
+
+"Differences in cortical structure between cognitively normal East Asian and Caucasian older adults: a surface-based morphometry study"
+https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77848-8
+
+https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-02-05/trumpite-neighbor-unity-capitol-attack
+
+B.F. on JKR (https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3883966591638029?comment_id=3884054068295948&reply_comment_id=3884243454943676):
+> I am very glad that I don't have anyone with opinions similar to hers in my immediate vicinity, because I am pretty sure that if I did, my brain would constantly be running a scared loop in any social interactions with them. [...]  I think it's important that people can write essays that are as far outside my personal Overton window as hers is outside it (because sometimes they're correct and I should update, even though I don't believe this is an instance of that)
+
+https://www.newsweek.com/we-need-balance-when-it-comes-gender-dysphoric-kids-i-would-know-opinion-1567277
+
+https://trickymothernature.substack.com/p/one-long-cum
+
+"Horrified Mother Gets Front Row Seat to Sex & Gender Indoctrination Strategy Meeting"
+https://archive.li/pmuhQ
+
+https://gcacademianetwork.weebly.com/
+
+https://patch.com/illinois/evanston/northwestern-neuroscientist-found-dead-after-racism-allegations
+
+https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-take-the-penis-off-its-pedestal/
+
+AGP testimony https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDE9H8i2Vw0
+
+"A Typology of Gender Detransition and Its Implications for Healthcare Providers"
+https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2020.1869126
+
+https://medium.com/@mariacatt42/how-to-do-your-own-differential-diagnosis-and-why-its-total-bullshit-that-you-would-have-to-461077985659
+
+black physics grad student
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/lk8abe/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_15/go3rqcf/
+
+(paywalled)
+https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/02/20/little-is-known-about-the-effects-of-puberty-blockers
+
+(metered)
+https://gen.medium.com/the-sports-arena-has-become-conservatives-favorite-anti-trans-battleground-8cc3adc533cf
+
+https://wepon.tumblr.com/post/620926931352862720/my-current-top-10-favorite-posts-on-slate-star
+
+I've frequently argued against the social practice of people being expected to declare (in their social media profile, or on badges at conferences) what third-person pronouns others should use to refer to oneself. The end goal of transitioning—one would think—is to be organically perceived as the sex other than one's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/).
+
+What pronoun other people _naturally_ use to refer to you when they're _not_ trying to be polite, but just trying to _talk about the world they see_ in the language that comes naturally to them, is a test of whether your transition is actually _succeeding_ at the goal of changing your (perceived) sex.
+
+https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article#comment-1263382
+> like a screed complaining about Jewish bankers, being read by someone whose only opinion of bankers is that they provide a safe place for him to store his money
+
+https://avoiceformen.com/featured/my-son-doesnt-want-to-be-a-man/
+
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2695466/
+
+https://jezebel.com/these-girls-just-wanted-to-run-the-right-wanted-a-war-1846280528
+
+https://unspeakablelgbtq.weebly.com/the-stories
+
+"Varied Reports of Adult Transgender Suicidality: Synthesizing and Describing the Peer-Reviewed and Gray Literature"
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436370/
+
+------
+
+[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
+
+I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
+
+[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
+
+If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
+
+(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
+
+Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
+
+-----
+
+Amy Harmon quoting Half Sigma and Jason Malloy back in the day?! Times have changed https://archive.is/6cXMD