I don't think we're in equilibrium; I don't think everyone knows what's going on
-
fragments—
O Wad Some Power the Giftie Gie Us; Or, the Identity Dysphoria Trap (school dysphoria)
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/11/30/36431918/if-the-future-is-nonbinary-its-a-bleak-one-for-women
-"Obviously I socially gender him as male as per his preference."
-
-"I wouldn't call it a 'preference' exactly."
-
-"I gender him male as per his philosophical commitments"
-
https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/28/5661118/lab-mice-fear-men-not-women-big-problem-for-science
Mad Ouroboros on the Somewhere Else Discord speculates that "don't call me cis" gendercrits and AFAB enbies are having the same internal gender experience
"Power that is not aligned with natural law leads to evil, because it requires constantly denying reality and punishing dissenters."
"OK, but I still want my own breasts"
-Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
-
but I am starting to get a more detailed appreciation of how the thing-that-is-good-that-I-want-to-call-"individualism" has a lot of missing implementation details; "Everyone's self-reported self-identity must be uncritically respected" social norms are trying to maximize a certain kind of individual choice (you not only get to choose your gender, you can even write-in a new one!), but that choice is taking place in the context of a very specific delusional cultural environment that penalizes other kinds of individual choices (like criticizing the delusions)
I'm sad that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because everyone's self-report says it's wrong" to "self-reports are pretty crazy" probably has implication for "Red Pill is probably wrong because everyone's self-report says it's wrong"
31 December
"SSC also helped me understand trans issues" https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/kng0q4/mixed_feelings_on_scott_alexander/
+Still citing it (22 Mar 21): https://twitter.com/Cererean/status/1374130529667268609
+
+Still citing it (2 May 21)!!: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
+
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/
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
+"Integrating Transwomen and Female Athletes with Differences of Sex Development (DSD) into Elite Competition: The FIMS 2021 Consensus Statement"
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-021-01451-8
https://impossiblehq.com/well-see/
"Varied Reports of Adult Transgender Suicidality: Synthesizing and Describing the Peer-Reviewed and Gray Literature"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436370/
+-----
+
+Amy Harmon quoting Half Sigma and Jason Malloy back in the day?! Times have changed https://archive.is/6cXMD
+
+Univariate fallacy again https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html
+
+https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/america-has-a-boy-crisis/
+
+-----
+
+The problem isn't that I particularly care about citing some particular Canadian clinical psychologist; the problem is that I aspire to work in a paradigm that's _solely_ about minimizing the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions (even when it hurts, perhaps _especially_ when it hurts), which puts me in conflict with a culture that prioritizes other things, like "politeness" or "not triggering horrible dysphoria" or "not giving rhetorical ammunition to our hate-filled ideological enemies who want me and my friends to not-exist". Removing citations to the Canadian clinical psychologist wouldn't actually solve the real conflict.
+
+I mean that the joint trait distribution of males-on-exogenous-estrogen-who-have-either-been-castrated-or-are-on-spironolactone is not only not the same as the joint trait distribution of untreated natal females, it's _also_ going to be a better fit to the joint trait distribution of untreated natal males along the many dimensions that aren't sufficiently affected by exogenous hormone replacement therapy, and that this is sufficiently robust that it's useful to be able to express concisely with a short phrase such as "biological sex exists", even in cases where I don't have the expertise or data to prove it, and this is important because most of life depends on tacit knowledge embedded in linguistic and cultural priors, rather than provable expertise and data.
+
+There's this cultural pattern that only went mainstream about five years ago where smart progressive people want to apply _strict scrutiny_ to any attempt to refer to or reason about sex. The culture almost never requires you to flat-out _lie_ about anything; there's just this coordinated juggernaut of gerrymandered concepts and unparsimonious implied causal theories and isolated demands for rigor that I think are _in practice_ making everyone crazy, even if you can never catch anyone in an easily verifiable lie.
+
+Ordinary people can _in fact_ recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy (hair covered, males clean-shaven) even though we don't have introspective access to _how_ our brains are accomplishing this high-dimensional image-classification task: <http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf>, and this is actually important for understanding what's actually going on in the heads of TERFs who cry, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that's a man! How dumb do you think we are?! Fraud!! Gaslighting!!1!"
+
+If the normative high-status response in your culture is to say, "How do you know? What do you mean by _man_? I think this is just dumb gatekeeping, and you're a horrible person who deserves contempt", then I think your culture ends up very confused about human behavior, because minimizing the length of the message needed to desribe your observations (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length>) would require concepts to which the culture has assigned long codeword lengths ("assigned at birth"). But I can't prove it.
+
+(I borrowed the "dumb gatekeeping" and "horrible people who deserve contempt" language from Brodski's blog post <https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/>)
+
+I'm _not happy_ about the fact that this belief puts me in conflict with everyone in Berkeley and _especially_ the people who are _exactly like me_ except born five years later but I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do?
+
------
-[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.)
+Everest brain regression
+https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804
+
+https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites
+
+---
+
+Scott Alexander—
+> It's hard to explain to people that yes, "we" have several billion dollars, but they still need to donate themselves.
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/m0vob7/why_hasnt_effective_altruism_grown_since_2015/gqhvuop/?context=3
+
+Maybe that's a sign that they shouldn't? Don't we want people to be making decisions on the basis of explanations?
+
+----
+
+Pre-emptive dismissal as "unrepresenative" is incoherent: if it's not representative, how are you guessing what about I'm say? (Counter: maybe the guess is because this non-representative thing gets selectively signal-boosted—but that doesn't work if the person is talking about their own experience and hasn't been selected)
+https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/644563577202704384/your-experiences-are-not-universal-theory-of
+
+https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes
+
+
+> the gray tribe gets its color by being the ashen waste of the blue tribe. Burned up in the misfortune of trying to actually compile the blue tribe source code
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/m0abd1/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_march_08_2021/gqvg6kv/
+
+----
+
+copied from old conversation with "Wilhelm"—
+
+the gender ratio between open-source vs. corporate software is pretty striking (~2% vs. ~20%); a hard-reactionary might argue, "women can't code, corporate women programmers are living in an astroturfed world and don't actually accomplish anything useful", whereas a more moderate position might be, "the sex difference in engineering aptitude is pretty small and women can do it fine when the appropriate incentives are there for them, but only men enjoy competing with each other for Internet Status Points"
+
+even where people have evidence from personal experience, that evidence gets interpreted through the haze of ideology (for better or for worse); Katie lived through her husband transitioning, but she didn't have the framework to make sense of it until she talked to me
+
+I was genuinely surprised by the race/IQ literature back in 2007; it wasn't that I was quietly knowledge-falsifying beforehand
+
+> one man's moderate is another man's radical when you have political inferential distance
+
+----
+
+I said: "Medical treatments aren't going to be harmful, or not-harmful as an objective binary; it's a cost-benefit thing. And things like osteoporosis risk, tenous thromboembolism risk, infertility, SRS complication risk, and the sheer inconvenience of being a lifelong medical patient are costs"
+Someone in Discord said: I'll take those risks over the risk of suicide any day
+
+... but that's if you've been sold the idea that don't-transition→suicide, which has been selected for emotional blackmail rather than being true
+
+----
+
+https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belong-on-girls-sports-teams/
+
+https://4thwavenow.com/2021/03/16/dutch-puberty-blocker-pioneer-stop-blindly-adopting-our-research/
+
+https://thepostmillennial.com/rob-hoogland-canada-prisoner-of-conscience
+
+https://www.feministcurrent.com/2020/12/06/the-sex-binary-is-not-a-western-construct-gender-identity-is
+
+"Self-Medication of Paraphilic Ideation Contributing to a Pulmonary Embolism: A Case Report"
+https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667296020300094
+
+"liberalism of the gaps"
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/lk8abe/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_february_15/gnsbftf/
+
+Blanch doesn't think HSTS is about getting men
+https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1372918358639849476
+
+https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/mara-keisling-on-the-trans-debate
+
+https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/19/when-transgenderism-discards-my-daughter-i-will-still-be-here-for-her/
+
+https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-eclipse-of-sex-by-the-rise-of-gender/
+
+https://mattbruenig.medium.com/liberal-pluralism-is-fake-7f27c9831d7d
+
+----
+
+From Discord—
+> Like, I just do not care about someone's sex, this is the least interesting part of their social gender. So for you older people, "gender" here means approximately gender role as you'd conceive of it. Why is this important? Well, thanks to the sterling work of the second wave feminists, gender roles are detached from sex. Now interestingly enough, at least some people have this thing that makes us want to play a gender role, and it makes us very happy when we manage and very sad when we don't manage. What it means to be a "gender" in this paradigm is that your brain wants you to play that gender role, broadly construed.
+> So, while I have the sex of male, that is the least interesting bit to my brain - I want to fill the gender role of "zoomer woman" and in this paradigm this is the only sensible way to define woman without just ignoring the only interesting part of gender. I understand that you're weird and like care about sex instead but I really do not understand what part of that is interesting. Someones sex does not determine their mind very well, as second wave feminism likes to say.
+
+----
-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.
+https://thenib.com/more-of-the-same/
-[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).
+https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/politics/white-supremacy-racism-asian-americans/index.html
+> In one sense, it's immaterial whether the accused killer in the Atlanta spa shootings admits to a racist motivation. Asian Americans, already traumatized by a rising tide of hate, violence and rhetoric, have been living in fear for months.
-(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.)
+https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/maffk1/march_22_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/gsa9hqt/
+> Tomboys are the best and I exclusively wage the culture war because progs and the lgbtq crap is a direct threat to the continued existence of tomboys.
-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.)
+tomboy respecters
+https://i.redd.it/xl8x1wixx7e51.jpg
+
+https://transliberalism.substack.com/
+
+Everyone wants to think they're an agent that's made an informed choice. And when the one comes to them and points out that they're the victim of a hostile memetic environment that's been conceptually gerrymandered to game them into making CRAZY choices for someone else's benefit, they take it personally. [...] 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!
+
+https://medium.com/@transphilosophr/t4t-and-the-micropolitics-of-trans-liberation-357df39df017
+
+https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784/full
+
+https://twitter.com/sinxoveretothex/status/1376923898386780163
+> Because if race is a proxy for something, that something is a proxy for race too.[...] You can't prove the causative direction you intended.
+
+relates to—
+
+> oh look, the Georgia voting law appears to be a set of facially neutral reforms that curtail voting in the most populous and Democratic areas in the state, which also happen to have the largest black populations.
+https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1377999458269548546
+https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html
+
+https://quillette.com/2021/04/02/when-sons-become-daughters-parents-of-transitioning-boys-speak-out-on-their-own-suffering/
+
+https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/04/01/trans-neo-nazi-group-taylor-parker-dipeppe-atomwaffen-division-florida-crime-jail/
+
+https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/04/the-claim-of-substantial-difference-in-mean-is-currently-not-based-on-strong-evidence/
+
+"free in my ontology and costly in another"
+https://twitter.com/acesounderglass/status/1380383145623580676
+
+"Considering Sex as a Biological Variable"
+https://academic.oup.com/edrv/advance-article/doi/10.1210/endrev/bnaa034/6159361
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/honesttransgender/comments/mnkgha/dont_say_trans_community_if_youre_just_talking/
+
+https://www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-inmates-are-raping-female-prisons-at-a-shocking-rate-ministry-of-justice-reveals/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/honesttransgender/comments/ec2kfd/unsure_if_or_how_i_can_find_my_place_in_the_trans/
+
+https://www.speedrun.com/news/632-2021-3-24-spotlight-four-women-in-speedrunning
+
+"Does Maltreatment in Childhood Affect Sexual Orientation in Adulthood?"
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535560/
+
+https://nintil.com/why-so-few-women-in-cs-the-google-memo-is-right
+
+The scene in _Invincible_ where Mark says, "That's sexist" in response to talk of getting the girl—some Amazon reviewers thought it was SJW garbage, but having been a teenage boy in the 'aughts, it felt very true-to-life
+
+https://www.feministcurrent.com/2021/04/12/heres-why-andrew-sullivans-proposed-truce-on-transgenderism-doesnt-work/
+
+https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/people-literally-do-not-understand-what-laws-are-or-how-they-work
+
+"The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against a private citizen for requesting public records from the Washington State Department of Corrections"
+https://thepostmillennial.com/aclu-blocks-womans-request-for-data-on-numbers-of-transgender-inmates-in-womens-prisons
+
+http://www.westcoastleaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/A.B.-decision-January-2020bcca11.pdf
+
+https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/merit-blake-smith
+
+Working in terms of variance exaggerates (e.g.) how little shared environment matters
+https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/delgiudice_apples-squared-apples_preprint.pdf
+
+Sometimes I forget how blinkered most radfems are; these comments are really bad; "AGP is not a sexuality"??
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/28008/the-problem-with-autogynephilia-trans-trending
+
+The depressing and hopeless thing about my "activist" project—such as it is—is that I'm trying to affect _concepts_, not _policy_. (I prefer to think of myself as an "informist"—trying to improve the _information_
+
+https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-accelerated-math-courses-equity
+
+"not getting the joke"
+https://blog.reaction.la/culture/governor-cuomo-shocked-that-women-will-do-anything-for-an-alpha-male-thug/
+https://blog.reaction.la/war/the-goal-is-soft-genocide-unless-stopped-the-outcome-will-be-hard-genocide/
+
+https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/pronouns-are-about-power
+
+life history switch https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/mtuhyd/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_19_2021/gvirbwb/
+
+----
+
+Notes from the "Cognitive Creationism" paper (https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/1/1/131) (No. 1 in the Journal of Controversial Ideas)—
+
+The decline of religion means that people turn to wokism—but I can't blame them; I'm exactly the same way—"rationalism" became my religion
+
+"Their science is driving theirinterpretation of Scripture, and not the other way round"—as a bad thing. Shades of Julia Serano
+
+----
+
+Biological sex is a "brighter line" (stabler Schelling point) than menopause, and legal reasoning often depends on such bright lines. (Thus, jurisprudence on the rule against perpetuities assumes that people are always fertile.)
+
+https://janhove.github.io/reporting/2015/02/05/standardised-vs-unstandardised-es
+https://janhove.github.io/design/2015/03/16/standardised-es-revisited
+https://janhove.github.io/design/2017/07/14/OtherRoadsToPower
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/28810/attraction-to-someone-you-don-t-know-is-trans-the-reality
+
+https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/husband-cross-dressing-turned-off-sex-advice.html
+
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble_(psychology)
+
+There should be a way to look down on the young without being dehumanizing about it. I approve of my teenage self relative to my surroundings
+
+adolescent self-esteem by race &c.
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263756/
+
+> We must secure the existence of our tomboys and a future for tomboy children.
+https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/n3obw1/may_03_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/gxelx5q/
+
+----
+
+Abort commenting on Facebook—
+
+A potential mechanism for why a single man looking for polyamorous partners could come off as "someone with poor odds affording themselves poorer odds" is if the request stems from a "markets for lemons" effect: men with poor mate value might think they have a better chance of finding someone (anyone) if they don't demand exclusivity—but the very fact of advertising this signals their poor mate value! I doubt this model is applicable to [...] particular (unusual) case, but if it applies to many other men, [...] might face the problem of credibly signaling to potential partners that he's not one of those guys—the information asymmetries can't just be moralized away!!
+
+Re normalization of poly and LGBT, I'm skeptical that "political" vs. "not-political" is a useful distinction here; everything that you and your friends happen to agree on looks "non-political". (Indeed, the contingencies of political coalition-formation would seem to be the only reason to lump "LGBT" together into one term/concept; if it weren't for having social conservatives as a commmon enemy, it's not obvious what (e.g.) androphilic males (G) and gynephilic-males-who-wish-they-were-females (part of the T) would have to do with each other, and the coalition may already be starting to fray.) The underlying psychological variations (towards homosexuality, or towards higher levels of sociosexuality) probably exist everywhere, but our culture's particular reification of "poly" or "LGBT" as sexual orientations is setting up an implicit cultural filter (a "political choice") that may be more visible to [...] than others.
-----
-Amy Harmon quoting Half Sigma and Jason Malloy back in the day?! Times have changed https://archive.is/6cXMD
+_not_ as a gender-role self-fulfilling-prophecy enforcement attempt (bulldozing the territory to fit a preconceivedly sexist map would be really bad!!)
+
+but as a neutral scientific claim that _could_ be false (like any falsifiable claim), but which I think is true and which I have citations for (attempting to map features of the territory that would probably still be there independently of whether or not they appear on the map, where sexist self-fulfilling prophecies are potentially a real concern, but I'm not that worried about them on the current cultural margin in Berkeley 2021, even though I would worry in other cities and years)
+
+----
+
+walking animation carry angle: https://www.biomotionlab.ca/html5-bml-walker/
+
+
+https://www.healthline.com/health/how-are-transgenders-born
+> For example, those who don't want to pass might: [...]
+> not identify with the norms present in cis culture
+> have a sense of gender that can’t be affirmed using reference points grounded in the cis experience
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/31752/why-do-trans-people-like-doing-things-that-are-feminine-but-even-females-don-t-l
+> only straight men talk about women's bodies like this.
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff