_(content warning too much information about weird fetishes)_
_(content warning WTF did I just read)_
-(November 2020, [TODO] words)
+(December 2020, [TODO] words)
(You can also think of this as psychological context-setting for my philosophy-of-language Sequence's forthcoming two-post conclusion, "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception" and "Motivation and Political Context for my Philosophy-of-Language Agenda")
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)
-Duncan's voicing my concern: https://www.facebook.com/duncan.sabien/posts/3890320517669303
+
-----
Points to work in—
* Superhappies empathic inference for not wanting to believe girls were different
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
+* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism
+
* "The Opposite Sex" https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/
* EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite)
* Vassar slapping me down
* "Mr. Davis"
* Faster Than Science, Transgender Edition (prior draft)
* "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"
-* empathic inference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism
* study evidence that this is actually common
* 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
-* wipe culturally defined values
+> 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>
+
* finding things in the refrigerator
* 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
+* the message length of my existence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)
+[TODO: "expecting women to be defective men"]
+* aren't all those transwomen going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious
+* stress fracture vs. sprain: psychology is more complicated, but the basic moral holds
+* "I don't care" "It sounds like you do care"
+* pronouns do have truth conditions
+ * The text of this blog post is not something a woman could have written
+ * as a programmer, I have learned to fear dependencies
+* 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)
+* detachable
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NHPD3dLFNk9QE2Y/search-versus-design-1
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JBFHzfPkXHB2XfDGj/evolution-of-modularity
-----
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
-"gay and trans"
+In the political world, "gay and trans"—the identity-modifiers "stack".
+
+Etiologically, people who are "gay and trans" are ... straight.
+
+
+not needing permission from another person
+
------
https://archive.is/7Wolo
-> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky’s writings and being a trans woman (can’t bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
+> the massive correlation between exposure to Yudkowsky's writings and being a trans woman (can't bother to do the calculations but the connection is absurdly strong)
Namespace's point about the two EYs
link back to Murray review: can't oppress people on the basis of sex if sex _doesn't exist_
If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
-(Though I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
people like me being incentivized to identify as part of a political pressure group that attempts to leverage claims of victimhood into claims on power
I'm not objecting to your existence, I'm only objecting to the prerequisites to your existence
-
(See Tailcalled on "zooming in" on the typology to at least a four node graph.)
But once you stop taking the "gender identity"/"woman trapped in a man's body" story as _axiom_ and
-
It's possible to disagree with people's _theoretical account_ of their own psychology, without doubting the honesty of their self-report, in the sense that people are doing their best to translate the ineffable _qualia_ of their experience into words.
[throw a chair](/2019/Jan/use-it-or-lose-it/) and yell, "How dumb do you think we are?!"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/
-my pseudobisexual moments
+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.
+
+
+
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.
/2016/Dec/joined/
It Might Be Cool https://xkcd.com/535/
+
+even after taking into account that the phrase "once you know what to look for" is a 20-meter fire-truck-red flag for [confirmation bias](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rmAbiEKQDpDnZzcRf/positive-bias-look-into-the-dark).
+
+
+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. A trans woman I know thinks I'm 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 via 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 her for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), but I still think she's reading me wrong.
+[agree that scapegoating is real]
+
+complicit with cissexism:
+/2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
+/2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
+
+I guess I feel pretty naïve now, but—I _actually believed our own propoganda_. I _actually thought_ we were doing something new and special of historical and possibly even _cosmological_ significance.
+
+**Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** I'm _not_ trying to tell other people how to live their lives, because _that would be crazy_. I am obviously _not smart enough_ to tell other people what they should do _and get the right answer_. True, I am skeptical of currently-popular _theories_ of how gender works and how gender dysphoria works,[^concepts] because I think they are _false_ in certain knowable aspects and that I have a more accurate view in certain knowable aspects. That is _not the same thing_ as telling people to detransition! Maybe lots _more_ people should transition! But in order to _figure out_ what the correct decisions are—or what the best decisions are conditional on your axiomatic subjective values—we need to **get the theory right**.
+
+Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
+
+The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about in Berkeley 2020.
+
+If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these clever category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language (pronouns and more) because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument, but using the _same_ ordinary word-choice algorithms that they used for everything else.
+
+I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend "Irene" a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman."
+
+
+
+Perhaps so. But back in 2009, **we did not anticipate that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.**
+
+**To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**
+
+I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+
+[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+
+https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
+
+R₀
+"You can't lift a ten-pound weight with one pound of force!"
+https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/
+
+The debate never advances; Arthur Jensen on the Phil Donahue show
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtoqK1gsmHI
+
+The Eliezer Yudkowsky I remember wrote about [how facts are tightly-woven together in the Great Web of Causality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-truths-contagious-lies), such that [people who are trying to believe something false have an incentive to invent and spread fake epistemology lessons](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTWkjCJScy2GFAgDt/dark-side-epistemology), and about the [high competence threshold that _forces_ correct conclusions](http://sl4.org/archive/0602/13903.html).
+
+A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for [questioning religion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural), is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand Occam's razor on a _deep_ level, when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) around them will do anything to prevent them from applying the parsimony skill to the God hypothesis.
+
+A culture where there are huge catastrophic consequences for questioning gender identity, is a culture where it's harder to train alignment researchers that genuinely understand the hidden-Bayesian-structure-of-language-and-cognition on a _deep_ level, when the social web around them will do anything to prevent them from [invalidating someone's identity](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
+
+—
+
+
+[evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement),
+
+
+(Though I think I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience: I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
+
+Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
+
+But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
+
+If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
+
+The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2020 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
+
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+
+Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
+
+But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages), where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue. The convention used in one's native language probably _does_ [color one's thinking to some extent](TODO: "Crossing the Line" link),
+
+The thing I'm objecting to is this culture of _narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
+
+[TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
+
+[TODO: Anton on "be a lesbian by behavior alone"; contrast to coining "transbian" as a new word: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7 ]
+
+[TODO: it was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice]
+
+On the question of how this affects the productivity of AI researchers, I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins.
+
+[TODO: it's actually the same rationality skill of parsimony]
+
+[TODO: ...]
+
+https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf
+
+
+
+One man willing to make an extraordinary effort
+
+You've got to ask yourself one question.
+
+Just _how dumb_ do you think we are? [_Defect!_](/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/)
+
+
+
+
+
+Stereotypically, heterosexual marriages tend not to last when the AGP husband's eggshell cracks.
+
+
+In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch.
+
+Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other.
+
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff