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"
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/
"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
----
-Pre-emptive dismissal as "unrepresenative" is incoherent: if it's not representative, how are you guessing what about I'm say?
+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
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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+-----
+
+_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