-Sections I should be able to easily make progress-per-minute on—
-* Dr. Will Powers
-* I Don't Do Policy
-* Cara's Egregore
-* Scott Alexander Understands Language
-* Moral Error and Moral Disagreement
+Resolved: publish "Sexual Dimorphism" soon as just the first part, the political coda is too hard to finish in a timely manner and will have to be a separate post
+TODO for "Sexual Dimorphism"—
-Points to work in—
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
-* wipe culturally defined values: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement (this might have to go after Failed-Utopia #4-2)
-* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession "Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a profession discovers a sense of beauty in it." same thing with an ideology; http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/
-* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
+--------
-Terminology to explain before use—
-* Singularity/paperclip/Methods
-* "non-exclusively androphilic" / nonhomosexual
+While [the Sequence explaining Yudkowsky's metaethics](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/metaethics-sequence) was being published (which a lot of people, including me, didn't quite "get" at the time; I found a [later précis](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zqwWicCLNBSA5Ssmn/by-which-it-may-be-judged) easier to understand), I was put off by the extent to which Yudkowsky seemed to want to ground the specification of value in [the evolved design of the human brain](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cSXZpvqpa9vbGGLtG/thou-art-godshatter), as if culturally-defined values were irrelevant, to be wiped away by [the extrapolation of what people _would_ want if they knew more, thought faster, _&c._](https://arbital.com/p/normative_extrapolated_volition/).
-* everyone who wants to talk about AGP to call us predators
+And the _reason_ I felt that way was because I was aware of how much of a historical anomaly my sacred ideological value of antisexism was. Contrast to Yudkowsky's [casually "sexist" speculation in the comment section](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BkkwXtaTf5LvbA6HB/moral-error-and-moral-disagreement/comment/vHNejGa6cRxh6kdnE):
-* too big to fail
+> If there are distinct categories of human transpersonal values, I would expect them to look like "male and female babies", "male children", "male adults", "female children", "female adults", "neurological damage 1", "neurological damage 2", not "Muslims vs. Christians!"
-* claims to victimhood are leveraged into claims to power
+You can see why this view would be unappealing to an ideologue eager to fight a culture war along an "Antisexism _vs._ Sexism" axis.
-* I need to put this behind me
+Looking back—I do think I had a point that culturally-inculcated values won't completely wash out under extrapolation, but I think I was vastly underestimating the extent to which your current sacred ideology _can_ be shown to be meaningfully "wrong" with better information—and, by design of the extrapolation procedure, this _shouldn't_ be threatening.
-* not a theory of trans men
+Your morality doesn't have to converge with that of your genetic twin who was raised in a culture with a different ideology/religion—maybe culturally learned values from childhood get "frozen" after reasoning ability kicks in, such that I would never see eye-to-eye with my genetic analogue who was raised with (say) a traditional Muslim view of relations between the sexes, no matter how much we debates and no matter how many new facts we learned.
+
+At the same time, while reflecting on one's own values and how to refine them in response to new information new situations, the question of what your genetic analogue raised in a different culture would think is _relevant_ information.
+
+["Anyone who gives a part of themselves to a[n ideology] discovers a sense of beauty in it."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LRKXuxLrnxx3nSESv/should-ethicists-be-inside-or-outside-a-profession)
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility
+
+
+[...]
+
+
+When I introspect on the _causes_ of my gender problems, I see three parents in the causal graph: autogynephilia, being a sensitive boy rather than a macho guy, and my committment to antisexist ideology (wanting to treat feminism as a religion, as a special case of egalitarianism as our state religion).
+
+[...]
+
+If I want to be aligned with women in the sense of AI alignment, and genuinely do right by them, how to accomplish that _depends on_ the actual facts of the matter about sex differences and similarities.
+
+[...]
+
+(During the vicissitudes of [my 2017 psychotic episode](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/), [I wrote a note](/images/cooperate_note.jpg): "cooperate with men who cooperate with women [who] cooperate with men who cooperate with women who cooperate with men".)
+
+[...]
+
+Suppose it _is_ true that female adults and male adults have distinct transpersonal values. At the time, I found the prospect horrifying—but that just shows that the design of male transpersonal values _contains within it_ the potential (under appropriate cultural conditions) to be horrified by sex differences in transpersonal values.
+
+If, naïvely, [I don't _want_ it to be the case that women are a different thing that I don't understand](/2019/Jan/interlude-xvi/), but that preference _itself_ arises out of [...]
-* [the autogynephilic analogue of romantic love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).
-(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")
+-------
-* my vocabulary is trained on the robot cult
+Diary: never do drag
-Aren't those trans women going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious
+--------
-like the time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
+Like when someone in the _Overcoming Bias_ comment section addressed me as "Mr.", and I
+
+_ playing dumb initials anecdote
+Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html ; contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky: "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)
+
+--------
+
+_ Vassar clapback anecdote
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267438
+
+------------
+
+
+
+-------END OF NEEDED SCENES-------
+
+_ more empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
+
+
+* Scott Alexander Understands Language
+
+
+
+Terminology/vocab to explain before use—
+* Singularity/paperclip/Methods/existential risk
+* "non-exclusively androphilic" / nonhomosexual
+
+"A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (need to use it somewhere, and this is my capstone)
+
+* everyone who wants to talk about AGP to call us predators
+
+* I need to put this behind me
+
+* not a theory of trans men
+
+https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj
+
+I read everything I could about the James Watson affair in 2007
-If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
-I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
[AGP is used as a weapon, but I think it's an actual claim]
-https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/
-I'm not at war with trans _people_: open, creative, brilliant people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with an _ideology_ which I think is making a lot of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
+https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/
+
+the causal theory here is _retarded_
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/
-Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
-What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to this aggressive recruitment campaign?
-* AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways. Tri-S was explicitly not for transsexuals
> The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles… yep, looks like it.) <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Gay-and-Lesbian-Families-Are-Happier-than-Heterosexual-Ones-77094.shtml>
-Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_.
* EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
* Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
-
-[TODO: my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
-our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.]
https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/
-"people who have sexual fetishes that can't possibly be realized using existing technology [...] like the guy who gets on by entropy decreasing in a closed system"
-https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1049
+my vocabulary is trained on the robot cult really hard; I can't talk to anyone else
-* If I want to stay aligned with women, then figuring out how to do that depends on the facts about actual sex differences; if I want to do the value-exchange suggested in
+nothing left to lose
-Normal straight men also have positive-valence thoughts about women when they're not immediately horny.
+https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/03/01/autogynephilia-is-vaguely-defined/
-----
+https://carcinisation.com/2015/06/03/the-memetic-commons/
+
+"never advocate" https://graymirror.substack.com/p/glasnost-and-perestroika
+
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."
(write script to extract links, with useful argparse, incl. dropping into a Python shell)
no safe defense https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science
-* finding things in the refrigerator https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pL3To6G42AeihNtaN/rational-vs-scientific-ev-psych
-* https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
+_ finding things in the refrigerator https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pL3To6G42AeihNtaN/rational-vs-scientific-ev-psych
+_ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
+
* make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
* the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length) http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/10/hobbyhorse-apology/
[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]
* pronouns do have truth conditions
* The text of this blog post is not something a woman could have written
-
-* The lie will rot, maybe ppl will be honest after the convention has set in??
-
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NHPD3dLFNk9QE2Y/search-versus-design-1
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBFHzfPkXHB2XfDGj/evolution-of-modularity
-"Prenatal testosterone exposure is related to sexually dimorphic facial morphology in adulthood"
-https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1351
the [Sara Bareilles tune I chose as the breakup song](https://genius.com/Sara-bareilles-gonna-get-over-you-lyrics) is probably etched deeper into my auditory cortex than my mother's voice
(Where "girls" are the ones with a vagina, breasts, _&c._)
-changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC
+
/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/
/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/#a-thing-about-me
-> The absolute inadequacy of every single institution in the civilization of magical Britain is what happened! You cannot comprehend it, boy! I cannot comprehend it! It has to be seen and even then it cannot be believed!
-http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/108
> The realization blasted through Harry like a vast dam breaking, releasing out all its water, bursting through his mind in an irresistible flood that swept everything away.
> There is only one reality that generates all of the observations.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
-
-
Anyway, four years later, it turns out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake. The thing that convinced me of this was not _even_ the late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis that I was originally trying to talk about. Humans are _really complicated_: no matter how "obvious" something in psychology or social science to me, I can't write someone off entirely simply for disagreeing, because the whole domain is so complex that I always have to acknowledge that, ultimately, I could just be wrong.
But in the _process_ of trying to _talk about_ this late-onset-gender-dysphoria-in-males-is-not-an-intersex-condition thesis, I noticed that my conversations kept getting _derailed_ on some variation of "The word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that." _That_ part of the debate, I knew I could win.
but let me start with the simple story first.)
+
(Where psychology is complicated enough such that there's much more to be said about what , and what better approximations would look like, but simple theories that [explain a lot of our observations](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) are .)
Tail's criticism of the draft—
Everyone else shot first
-EGS??
+
> First, it is not enough to learn something, and tell the world about it, to get the world to believe it. Not even if you can offer clear and solid evidence, and explain it so well that a child could understand. You need to instead convince each person in your audience that the other people who they see as their key audiences will soon be willing to endorse what you have learned.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/social-proof-but-of-what.html
-cooperate with men who cooperate with women
-
Cross-gender identity is a virtually sustained or intermittently occurring wishful fantasy about being a person of the opposite sex.” Freund, K., Steiner, B.W. & Chan, S. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63 (1982). DOI: 10.1007/BF01541365
twenty-one month Category War is as long as it took to write the Sequences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9jF4zbZqz6DydJ5En/the-end-of-sequences
https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
> damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
> I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???
+
+* Dr. Will Powers
+
+[TODO: another clinical perspective: Dr. Will Powers]
+
+Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598). I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers says Blanchard has been disproven, but that autogynephilia does exist _very_ rarely: "[i]n my now almost 7 years of treating transgender patients, I have seen this paraphilia only once in a person requesting MtF therapy", Powers says, going on to describe the particularly delusional patient (who wanted "the largest breasts possible", and claimed he needed to become a woman to please a Russian Instagram model whom he implausibly claimed to be his girlfriend) whom he denied informed-consent treatment.
+
+You might ask, why am I citing Will Powers in support of my thesis, when Powers's testimony seems to contradict it? Only one case in seven years, he says.
+
+I cite it because—surprise! _Powers was lying._ [In a November 2020 post to his own subreddit, he opens up](https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/):
+
+> Every time I try and speak on this, I get attacked. People discredit what I have to say, call it harmful, and hateful. [...] I've previously stated I had one of these in my practice. I stated that, because I didn't want to push the narrative that it was common because I get literally eviscerated every time I try and talk about it. In reality, I see it fairly often. Almost once a month. Probably at least 10 times a year. [...] Continuing to lie about it and act like it isn't happening is a disservice to transgender people as a whole.
+
+You might think,
+
+This comment in particular is really something—
+https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
+
+https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/03/our-default-info-system-status-and-gossip.html
+
+And because the brain and body are an integrated system, people's intuitive sense of [which parts are "me"]() and which parts are "just" "my body" (which can be swapped out without changing who "I" am), may be much less straightforwardly connected with reality than they'd like to think.
+
+
+But how would that work? The experience described by this trope would be something you'd predict if sexuality was implemented in a separate brain module that could stay with the rest of the body even while the "soul" (the implementation of someone's personality, memory, _&c._) gets swapped out. But if the brain isn't actually modularized that way, the magical transformation process would have to do a lot more custom engineering work (to "fit" the brainware-construed-as-"soul" with sexuality-brainware that matches the body) to get the particular outcome portrayed in the stories.
+
+The problem is that, in the real world, the guys who are jacking off to the _fantasy_ of knowing what it's like to be female, are being motivated by a variation in _male_ sexuality.
+
+A common trope in female transformation erotica (search for _tg caption blog_ if you want examples) is that sexuality "goes with the body": in these stories, men who have been magically swapped bodies with women, often express excitement or horror (depending on the story and the author) about the discovery that they're attracted to guys now—or alternatively, express gratitude that the woman he swapped with was a lesbian.
+
+Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body". Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/yTdJm7JjPJPynwS3a
+
+
+
+
+, something you should be able to ["consider [...] open-mindedly and then steal only the good parts"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YicoiQurNBxSp7a65/is-clickbait-destroying-our-general-intelligence).
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff