_(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.
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/).
+
+
+The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
+
+
+
+
+(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. In the same way, 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.
+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 2019 (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.
+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.
-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.**
+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?"
-**To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off!**
+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),
-I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here?
+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_.
-[cruelty to ordinary people, optimized to confuse and intimidate people trying to use language to reason about the concept of biological sex]
+[TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
-https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
+[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/)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff