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
+
+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?
+
+------
+
+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?
+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/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff